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Reviewed by:
  • The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture ed. by Kathryn E. Holliday
  • Joel Barna
The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture. Edited by Kathryn E. Holliday. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 448. Illustrations, notes, index.)

David Dillon, with a Ph.D. in literature from Harvard, came to Dallas to teach at Southern Methodist University in 1969. In 1980, he wrote an essay for D Magazine, provocatively titled “Why is Dallas architecture so bad?” In 1981, he became the full-time architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, a position he held until 2006. During that twenty-five-year stretch, he wrote more than one thousand articles for the newspaper, while also contributing to national and regional architecture magazines and other publications. In the mid-1990s, he moved back to Massachusetts, where he taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and continued his prolific writing output. He died in 2010.

The quality and the volume of his writings, which have touched on and helped shape many significant changes in Dallas and the North Texas region, made Dillon respected in his field and beloved in the city that was his sometime-home. In 2011, donors came together to fund creation of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture in the University of Texas at Arlington’s College of Architecture, Planning, and Public Affairs. University buildings and programs are almost never named for anyone but a big donor any more. In that context, the existence of the Dillon Center is testimony to the impact of his career.

The Open-Ended City was edited by Kathryn E. Holliday, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington and the founding director of the Dillon Center. In her introduction, Holliday says that she chose the sixty-odd pieces that make up the book with the goal of showing Dillon’s role as an interpreter of architecture outside the confines of the profession, and as a key figure in creating a new tradition of architectural criticism in Texas. Holliday’s argument is bolstered by an afterword, “The Tradition of Architecture Criticism in Texas,” by architectural historian Stephen Fox of Houston, who writes: “Dillon demystified architectural criticism in Dallas. He demonstrated that the goal of criticism was not stylistic commentary but a clarification of the processes through which decisions are made about how the public landscape is shaped” (406–407). Though mostly centered on contemporary projects in Dallas and Fort Worth, Dillon’s essays tackled issues that affect virtually all American cities.

The early1980s was a wild time in land development in Dallas and throughout Texas. New buildings were going up fast, driven by one of the state’s periodic oil booms and, most of all, by a bubble in financing from newly deregulated banks and savings and loan institutions. Much of the building was nondescript, and as the boom continued, block after block [End Page 491] of old buildings were razed, leaving scattered new towers amidst acres of surface parking lots. Some downtown streets held no more urban vitality than freeway ramps. Throughout Texas, cities became, in Dillon’s words, the hole in the doughnut.

The architectural press played a role as gatekeepers—independent assessors of taste who could translate the cloistered traditions and aesthetics of architecture for the public and also stoke the market. But over time, architectural criticism decreased until it had largely retreated to specialized academic and professional journals. However, things have changed in Texas downtowns, largely for the better. People have moved into them by the thousands; entertainment districts bring people from the suburbs to what in the 1980s had been a frightening wasteland.

As the essays in The Open-Ended City show, David Dillon played an important role in making that transition happen. From the first essay to the last, he condemned simplistic “big-picture thinking” (the reason he thought Dallas architecture was so bad in 1980) and argued for design that would bring actual human connection back to city streets. Holliday writes that Dillon “maintained a persistent belief in the ability of an engaged citizenry to demand higher quality and greater accountability for urban context,” and that he championed...

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