{"id":996843,"date":"2026-08-12T21:56:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T21:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/996843\/"},"modified":"2026-08-12T21:56:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T21:56:25","slug":"architecture-critic-mark-lamster-releases-novel-on-dallas-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/996843\/","title":{"rendered":"Architecture critic Mark Lamster releases novel on Dallas history"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Lamster still remembers the first time Dallas entered his imagination. It wasn\u2019t a skyline. It wasn\u2019t a building. It was a helicopter shot from the opening credits of the iconic TV show<\/a> \u201cDallas,\u201d the camera pushing into the mirrored glass of the Hyatt Regency.<\/p>\n

That was long before he arrived here in 2013. Now, more than a decade later and freshly crowned with the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the Dallas Morning News architecture critic<\/a> has written the book that a city as strange as this one deserves. It\u2019s called \u201cWelcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas as Told Through Its Architecture,\u201d and it landed Aug. 4 through Deep Vellum Publishing.<\/p>\n

The title is not an accident. Lamster has spent years trying to understand a place that seems designed to resist understanding.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much of what it does sort of defies logic or even basic rational common sense,\u201d he says to the Observer, and you can hear the affection curling around the frustration. \u201cIt\u2019s always interesting to write about.\u201d He has a favorite metaphor for the job. \u201cOver the years, I\u2019ve come to think of writing about Dallas as going to the circus every day, because there\u2019s always something crazy, or weird, or entertaining happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

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THANK YOU!<\/p>\n

You’re all set.<\/p>\n

CLOSE\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

A city of glorious contradictions<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ask Lamster to define the paradox in his title, and the examples pour out like they\u2019ve been waiting.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s both incredibly rich and incredibly poor,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s got places that are beautiful and places that are just mind-bogglingly ugly.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The city he describes is not a single thing but a collision of things \u2014 \u201cheterogeneous people and spaces and ideas all jammed into one.\u201d White, Black, Latino, new immigrant communities, congregations of every faith, all elbowing for room inside one restless metropolis.<\/p>\n

Dallas, in his telling, is a place perpetually at war with its own better instincts. He describes its planning ethos as a willful tendency to \u201ctake two steps forward and two steps back at the same time.\u201d His favorite illustration is almost too perfect: the city built \u201can amazing park between the Trinity levees and then we\u2019ll run a highway through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

You laugh. Then you realize he isn\u2019t joking.<\/p>\n

Reading a city through its buildings<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most of us treat architecture the way we treat air. \u201cArchitecture and urban design are kind of like oxygen to most people,\u201d Lamster explains. \u201cYou need them, but you tend to not notice it and take it for granted.\u201d His book is an invitation to finally look up and see the invisible forces shaping the streets we drive without thinking.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s plenty worth looking at. Lamster reserves real reverence for Dallas City Hall, I.M. Pei\u2019s dramatic inverted wedge. \u201cAs purely as an object, it is an amazing, amazing work of architecture,\u201d he says. \u201cExtraordinary.\u201d It was, he notes, \u201cdesigned to define what Dallas is and what it should be and what it could become\u201d \u2014 which makes its current uncertain fate all the more poignant<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then there are the towers that first seduced him from the television screen. \u201cDallas has beautiful mirror glass buildings, whether it\u2019s the Hyatt or Fountain Place or Campbell Center,\u201d he says. \u201cGold, green, silver, every hue of glass.\u201d A city that dressed itself in reflection, forever showing us the sky instead of itself.<\/p>\n

His most delightful obsession, though, is the \u201cWoofus<\/a>,\u201d the peculiar fountain-sculpture born for the 1936 Centennial Exposition. \u201cTo me, it\u2019s the perfect metaphor for Dallas,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause it\u2019s incredibly weird looking, it\u2019s not especially beautiful, but it has this charm, and it\u2019s made up of all these different things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Follow the money<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lamster is not content to simply admire. He is, after all, a critic \u2014 the kind Dallas both needs and occasionally wishes would move away. His book traces the machinery behind the buildings, and that machinery runs on capital.<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s habit of bulldozing its own past, he argues, comes down to one thing. \u201cIt\u2019s about money, it\u2019s about developers and what powerful interests have always been able to mobilize the government power in their own interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nothing crystallizes this for him quite like Klyde Warren Park<\/a>. He genuinely admires it \u2014 \u201cIt gave the city a front lawn,\u201d he says, calling it \u201can extraordinary success\u201d and proof that Dallas can think progressively about repairing \u201cthe damage from the way it turned itself over to the car.\u201d And yet. He finds it \u201cstunning\u201d that the city\u2019s central green space is named for a 9-year-old whose sole qualification was being \u201cborn into a very, very wealthy family.\u201d That single fact, he says, \u201cspeaks a lot about the way money works in Dallas.\u201d<\/p>\n

The car, of course, is his great antagonist. The city\u2019s worst habit, he insists, is \u201cdesigning for the car instead of for the person.\u201d His verdict is blunt and unimprovable: \u201cYou can\u2019t make great public spaces that are great public spaces for cars.\u201d<\/p>\n

A partnership born in 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lovely symmetry to who is publishing this book. Lamster and Deep Vellum founder Will Evans<\/a> both landed in Dallas the same year, 2013, and struck up a friendship. Lamster credits Evans with almost single-handedly reviving a literary culture he found \u201cdormant or nascent.\u201d A book about a city coming into its cultural own, published by the man helping it do exactly that \u2014 even a skeptic has to smile at that one.<\/p>\n

The two will share a stage on Aug. 27 from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. at the Dallas Museum of Art\u2019s Horchow Auditorium, as part of the museum\u2019s beloved \u201cArts & Letters Live\u201d series. Expect the wit, the reverence and the righteous exasperation to be out in full force.<\/p>\n

Tickets are $30 for members and $35 for the public, available now through the DMA\u2019s event page<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Lamster still remembers the first time Dallas entered his imagination. It wasn\u2019t a skyline. It wasn\u2019t a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":996844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5135],"tags":[5229,2513,13239,1596,141257,1149,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-996843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-america","tag-architecture","tag-city-hall","tag-dallas","tag-history-nostalgia","tag-interviews","tag-texas","tag-tx","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117084775073030477","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=996843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/996844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}