An aerial perspective of Transform 1012 looking south.
Transform 1012
A few years ago, when I learned of a proposal to take a former Ku Klux Klan meeting house in Fort Worth and remake it as a community center, I did not think it was a good idea. I was familiar with the building, a brooding, derelict structure of tan brick built in 1925 on North Main Street, on the route from downtown to the Stockyards. It is an ugly thing, designed for intimidation.
Its location was chosen in part to give pause to minorities from Fort Worth’s Northside headed toward the city center. For those who know its history, just passing by produces a sense of unease, raising the specter of a violent, racist past that can seem eerily present.
The former Fort Worth headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.
Timothy Brestowski/Courtesy of Transform 1012 N. Main St.
Even some preservationists considered remaking rather than demolishing the building a bad idea. Why waste precious resources on a building designed to terrorize minorities instead of rehabilitating the places that served and were built by those communities?
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Germane Barnes, one of the architects responsible for reimagining the building, had similar reservations, at least at first. “They need to burn this thing down. That was my initial impulsive reaction,” he says. “We had so many conversations with community members and elders and people who have seen that building and all of its various forms. And when we finished all of those conversations, it was split right down the middle, fifty-fifty.”
For Dennis Chiessa, who first brought Barnes to see the building and is now partnering with him on the project, its fate has been a longtime preoccupation. The Fort Worth native and director of the graduate architecture program at the University of Texas at Arlington had taught studio classes that focused on the site and its problematic history. Chief among his concerns was that it would be demolished to make way for generic housing. “That’s a way of erasing history,” he says.
Their design for the building has me convinced that saving — and reimagining it — is the right decision. Reborn as the Transform 1012 Center for Arts and Community Healing, the 35,000-square-foot cultural hub will have a 250-seat theater, rehearsal studios for theater and dance, educational spaces, craft workshops, an interfaith chapel, a cafe, an outdoor amphitheater and administrative space for local organizations. Construction is scheduled to begin next year with an opening in late 2028.
Lobby and gallery level of Transform 1012.
Transform 1012
The $50 million project is the initiative of a coalition of nonprofit groups based in Fort Worth, among them DNA Works, SOL Ballet Folklorico, the Welman Project and the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice. Opal Lee, the force behind the Juneteenth Museum, which is scheduled to open next year on Fort Worth’s Southside, is an emeritus member of Transform 1012’s board.
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“This project provides the opportunity to show truly what restorative justice is through an architectural lens, and how you can take something that has such a raw and awful history and then turn it into something that’s hopeful,” says Barnes, whose Miami-based practice has gained attention for projects that grapple with both issues of identity and the formal language of architecture.
Barnes and Chiessa won the project in 2023 in an unusual competition that began not with the submission of a design but a “statement of values and commitments.” Four teams were selected as finalists and proceeded to meet with community members before presenting a design vision.
Transform is the operative word for the winning design, which guts the historic structure, turning it into a shell punctured by bright red extrusions. The effect will be to give the previously drab building a sense of dynamic play.
The architects have shifted the principal entry off Main Street, moving it to the north side of the building, facing the communities that are its primary audience. “Who wants to go in through the front door of a KKK building?” says Chiessa.
Arriving visitors will move through a sequence of enclosed outdoor spaces with plantings by the landscape architect Ujijji Davis Williams of Detroit-based JIMA Studio. The intention is to provide a space for pause or reflection before entering a difficult and emotionally challenging site. “You’re going to need a second,” Barnes says, “whether that’s to brace yourself or to collect your thoughts.”
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Entry garden of Transform 1012.
Transform 1012
Barnes and Chiessa also rotated and reduced the scale of the original building’s theater, which was designed to accommodate nearly 4,000, even though the Fort Worth Klan membership was closer to 500, according to news reports of the time. In its new orientation, the theater breaks through the building’s shell, its red form announcing its presence to passersby. “If we want to make this a restorative place, we need to invite people to the performance,” Barnes says. “We need to show that this thing is happening.”
Furthering that goal, an amphitheater with seating for 400 will border the southern flank of the remade building.
In addition to color, the architects’ choice of material differentiates the new parts of the building from what remained of the original. Instead of brick, red precast concrete panels will be used for new structural elements. Brick salvaged from the demolished spaces of the Klan building are then used for pavers and seating. “You’re literally dancing on hate,” says Barnes.
It is a compelling and optimistic vision that in its balance of preservation and invention seems right for the moment. “We unfortunately live in a period of time where history is consistently being rewritten, if not just completely eliminated,” says Barnes. “And when you tell people that certain things existed without any physical proof, they immediately go into, ‘Well, that’s not real. I don’t believe it.’ ”
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Transform 1012 will be a bracing corrective to that kind of ignorance. “This building is a way of saying, ‘OK, we’re going to face the hard history, but we’re going to move on and we’re going to celebrate and do something that is positive for the community,’ ” says Chiessa.
The project is also a demonstration of the kind of intellectually rigorous and aesthetically ambitious architecture that is possible when independent practitioners are given an opportunity to build — an all-too-rare phenomenon, especially in North Texas.