Goodbye, history. Hello, drabness. That’s the latest development in Uptown and Oak Lawn, Dallas’ once and occasionally still charming neighborhoods that are increasingly dominated by boring office towers and upscale apartment buildings. Like it or not, that’s the way Dallas is going: No other city is so unabashed – even proud – in favor of anything lucrative and new.
A typical example of this development is the transformation of Maple Terrace, which was the city’s most glamorous address when it opened in 1925. This newspaper celebrated the opening with a front-page article calling it “another step in the evolution of Dallas into a thoroughly metropolitan city.”
In Dallas tradition, it had itself replaced a landmark: The three-story, turreted and domed Dilley mansion, built in 1892 in the Venetian style, was demolished to make way for an apartment building that cost its developers a million dollars – a first in the city.
The architect was Alfred Bossom, a New Yorker who had built the Adolphus Hotel and the Magnolia Building in Dallas, among others. For Maple Terrace, he designed a stately seven-story building in the Spanish Colonial style. It was whitewashed and stuccoed and stood on 7 acres of landscaped grounds with a swimming pool, tennis courts and putting greens. The ground-floor apartments were designed to take advantage of the cooling breezes. Over the years, it has housed a long list of celebrities, including Greer Garson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Judy Garland, Shirley MacLaine and Elvis Presley.
The new incarnation of Maple Terrace houses no one; the once-palatial interiors have been gutted and transformed into “boutique” office space by Houston-based developer Hines. The design is a joint project between two Dallas-based architecture firms, GFF and 5G Studio Collaborative.
(Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer)
What they have created is a denuded monument that is literally a shell of its former self. Bossom’s facade has been retained in the Potemkin style, but with new windows that take away much of its character. A new glass curtain wall covers the rear and extends into a two-story glass box on the roof of the building that provides additional office space. A newly constructed restaurant pavilion stands in front of the facility, marring the view from Maple Street. The whole is designed with a kind of prosaic modern competence, but lacks the personality of its predecessor.
The apartments haven’t disappeared entirely; in fact, there are more of them, but they have been moved to a new, 22-story, 345-unit tower directly behind the original building. A narrow courtyard occupies a gap between the old and new buildings.
One could argue that this is all a “win” for the city; a landmark that could have been torn down has been preserved and given new life with new amenities and much-needed housing (albeit at market rates). The other way of looking at it: It’s an architectural farce that turns a landmark into another banal monument to corporate greed.
The Quad
The Quadrangle’s redesign represents a less cynical, if imperfect, approach to history, one that acknowledges the past but speaks openly about the present. When it opened in 1966, the Quadrangle was touted as a “village” for “leisure and impulse shopping” — that is, an outdoor shopping center — with space for about 40 small shops and a theater.
Designed by Pratt, Box & Henderson, then the city’s most innovative architectural firm, and modeled on historic Santa Fe architecture, the charming and intimate building consisted of small buildings clad in warm stucco, connected by brick walkways, wooden lattices, and small plazas lit by terra-cotta light fixtures.
“The old Quadrangle was just a wonderful place,” says Tipton Housewright, a partner at Dallas-based architecture firm Omniplan. “It was a destination that you arrived at and really experienced. When you walked in, you were separated from the rest of the city and from cars. It was just this wonderful sequence of outdoor spaces, courtyards and beautifully composed buildings.”
The Quadrangle hasn’t looked like this for a long time. A series of ill-advised renovations in the 1980s turned it into a spruced-up shopping mall where cars took precedence over people.
Whether it could be restored to its original glory is an open question today. In 2022, developer Stream Realty demolished the dilapidated landmark and recently completed a project that attempts to recapture the spirit of its predecessor. Despite its shortened name, the rechristened Quad is larger than its predecessor, featuring a 12-story office tower alongside five standalone restaurant pavilions that open to a linear courtyard.
The tower is cleanly designed, the terracotta trim giving it more character than a typical high-rise building – for example, the new Maple Terrace Apartments. The design is by Omniplan, as are the restaurant pavilions. Each of these buildings is unique, but all are modernist interpretations of the bungalow-style houses that (used to) characterize the neighborhood. The most beautiful of all is the simplest: a steel structure with a gabled roof that looks like a child’s elaborate drawing.
Unlike the previous Quadrangle, which was surrounded by parking lots, the new buildings border directly on the sidewalk. An underground parking garage offers 700 spaces for drivers who do not want to park on the street.
“We know how walkable Uptown is,” says Andy Fast, Associate Principal at Omniplan. “We wanted to preserve that as much as possible.”
That the buildings face inward and have no entrances to the street is a bit of a shame, but there is enough space between the pavilions to allow passersby to see where the action is, although those passageways could be more inviting. The courtyard, really more of a strip with some greenery designed by Dallas-based landscape architects TBG, could also be more dynamic in its geometry.
While the result may resemble the sterile Trinity Groves complex more than the original Quadrangle, it is at least a serious attempt to create real community benefit.
The Terminal
Maple Terrace and the Quad are reimaginings of historic landmarks. The Terminal at Katy Trail is something else entirely, though I’m not quite sure what, nor does it seem that its creators themselves have a better idea. The luxury mixed-use building, which borders the Katy Trail at Fitzhugh Avenue, features 16 apartments (if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford one), four “curated and wellness shopping experiences,” two restaurants, and a parklet (with kitschy art) named after the late oil heiress Caroline Rose Hunt.
The confusion begins with the name. First of all, “The Terminal” seems like an ill-advised choice for a residential community where many residents are likely to be senior citizens. Assuming it is a reference to the abandoned railroad line that became the Katy, it is simply wrong: terminals are the endpoints of a line. This terminal is in the middle. A change to “The Station” would be appropriate. Also, it is The Katy Trail.
Nomenclature aside, the building is a clunky, disorganized mess, with a drab beige superstructure that juts out oddly above a vaulted brick base to which it bears no discernible relationship. More than one architect has pointed out to me the proximity of his apartments to a power line that runs along the path.
The design is by Austin-based architect Michael Hsu, a specialist in hospitality environments. (His wood-frame building in East Dallas for Asian barbecue joint Loro is excellent.) You can get an idea of where things went wrong by considering his stated desire for the terminal to be “classic and modern at the same time.” That’s a difficult trick, and it didn’t work here. But you don’t have to just take my word for it. I recently posted some pictures of the project on social media. A sampling of the reactions:
- “Pretty unattractive design.”
- “Really bad.”
- “Great view of power transmission lines.”
- “Bizarre composition, ugly materials and colors.”
Ouch.
To its credit, it does try to provide a public space that provides access to the Katy Trail—the small park mentioned above—but if you want to use it, you have to put up with background music and platitudes (“Happiness is not a destination, but a way of traveling”) from its namesake.
Why highlight these three projects? They’re hardly the worst developments in Dallas. The endless rows of gray apartment blocks along Beckley, Ross, Sylvan, Singleton, and so many other avenues are certainly a bigger problem. But these three have higher design ambitions—and budgets. So they tell us something about what’s important to us, our “way of traveling.” For now, that seems like a highly comfortable but boring sense of luxury that nods to history but doesn’t really engage with it.
We can do better.
