Review by Hayden Bergman

The Open-Ended City

Edited by Kathryn E. Holliday
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2019. 448.

In what way do public policy and private equity intersect? It’s a difficult question to answer—perhaps even more difficult is this—How should public policy and private equity intersect? Faced with such questions, David Dillon provided answers as a critic who persistently wrote about the most important architectural and urban design happenings in Dallas from the 1980s into the new millennium and the potential ways in which those happenings could shape not only the city’s skyline but also its public psyche. One could wax biblical and say he was a voice like that of John the Baptist, speaking in a veritable desert of architectural perception and taste. Stripping away the sentiment, he was a writer and critic who possessed the requisite perceptive powers to see what Dallas’s virtues were: a forward-gazing optimism, ambition, and a relatively clean slate from which to vault into the future. Dillon was Harvard educated, with a deep knowledge of the various cities and traditions that often serve as models to designers and architects. He knew that architecture is a public medium of communication, constantly speaking to and influencing the psyches of local citizens—public design, then, takes on the same duties as language as it relates to place—it must be vernacular and local first, looking only then to tradition and hegemonic aesthetics. He also knew that his writings on Dallas were indicative of a larger conversation in cities across America about the role technology and urban design play in blurring the boundaries between the inner and outer life, between the self and other, and between private interest and the public good. Architecture, for Dillon, happened on the seams where those things come together—for him it was about, as much as anything, collisions, and at those collisions, he knew there were people, namely, public officials and high-profile developers. The book, The Open-Ended City, edited by Katyn E. Holliday, the founding director of the David Dillon Center for Architecture, is constructed in a way that highlights Dillon’s varied interests, and his voice, as well as his unique ability to “[tell] stories about architecture and cities tough focusing on stories about people” (41). 

Quickly upon arriving in Dallas, Dillon recognized that technology and public design had long been the city’s preferred method of pursuing self-definition, a pursuit undertaken by business people who often worked (or had worked) in technology. Erik Jonsson, an owner of Geographical Service Inc. (a Texas Instruments subsidiary), became mayor just after the Kennedy assassination, a time when Dallas felt much public shame and guilt about what happened to the most Whitmanian president to ever hold the office. Jonsson knew that technology, manifested in public building projects, was a way forward for the city, a way to latch onto a positive vision for the future, as well as a way to change the city’s perception to outsiders. In Dillon’s words, Jonsson “envisioned the city as a gigantic, integrated circuit in which everything from City Council meetings to ambulance service and traffic lights would run with computerized precision…a grand vision of the City Efficient” (42). Jonsson organized Goals for Dallas, a sweeping and ambitious program, one that included a diverse set of civic leaders—as Dillon writes “It marked the first time that whites, blacks, and Hispanics rolled up their sleeves and worked on the problems of the city together” (44). Consequently, Jonsson’s legacy is the Dallas Fort Worth Airport. At the time of its completion it “was the biggest airport in the world, the most expensive, and the most highly automated…It was efficient, far-sighted, and an engineering triumph” (49). At the opening ceremony, Mayor Jonsson said that “the sky would be Dallas’s ocean,” and Dillon agreed, writing that “it is Dallas’s most solid claim to being an “international city” (49). Dillon was, and is, correct. In a land-locked city on the Texas plains, Dallas, of course, has no port, and so historically had no access to the kinds of controlled chaos that allowed cities like Miami, Boston, New York, and Los Angeles to alchemize into cities of culture, of élan, which, paired with their considerable financial clout, made them hubs of business, entertainment, high society and culture, and a tilling avant-garde arts and street culture (as opposed to the boring avant-garde, you know the kind). Unfortunately, that rate of progress was unsustainable. As Dillon rightly pointed out in 1986, a charismatic leader can be just as much a future liability as a present asset—“Without [an] overriding vision, Dallas will likely end up with the same old mess,” (51) he wrote. And it did.

In a piece from 2006, Dillon profiles Uptown Dallas and Victory Park, an area that was “on life support, a casualty of 9/11” (102). Enter Ross Perot Jr., the man largely responsible for Victory Park being what it is today, a bustling, austere hub of professional sports, shopping, entertainment, and nightlife. Dillon writes on the billionaire heir in engaging prose, with a clear sense of metaphor and irony not often found in periodicals, and one gets the sense that Dillon is writing with an upward gaze, placing Perot Jr. in an ironically heroic light. His sense of what Vonnegut called the shape of stories is also apparent—that, combined with characters that stand as tall as the buildings they construct, make his profile stories fascinating reads. 

In terms of building design and technology, the current Victory Park is a gleaming marvel. Before Perot Jr. stepped in, Dillon writes it was a “polluted site on the edge of a twelve-lane freeway” (104). Thanks to his father’s fortune, Perot Jr. was able to buy huge tracts of land in the area and take a long-term view, perhaps begrudgingly. At the end of the profile, Dillon shows his own sense of humor and writing chops, as well as his subtle critical perception:

The subtly, along with the apparent lack of ego (or at least the suppression of it) by Dillon, are key. He lets Perot Jr. reveal himself without using any column space to point it out—Perot Jr. can’t be too concerned, can he? Otherwise, the same man who buys and sells sports teams and revitalizes entire swaths of major cities with his pocketbook would do something about the air quality as well. In allowing Perot to tell it, Dillon holds readers on both sides of the ideological fence, and he also, importantly for him and us, retains access to people such as Perot—a more agonistic stance might have prevented him from scoring such interviews.

This is not to say that Dillon wouldn’t wield the pen for cause. In the 1990s, a small group of Dallasites wanted to build an enormous freeway running north and south on the Trinity River, just next to downtown. Dillon’s opening line in his article on the project forcefully summarizes his position: “The only thing to do with the Trinity River Parks Plan is deep-six it” (133). Again, he goes on to highlight the tensions that arise in urban design, though this time he does so explicitly. In Dillon’s view, the Trinity River Parks plan would further separate the city, as it called for “ten lanes of highway…a chain of small recreational lakes….[all] on the east or downtown side of the river, with comparatively little for West Dallas and Oak Cliff. Sound familiar?” (133) (Oak Cliff has a, let’s say, fraught racial history). Dillon goes on, writing that “The sponsors of the plan, a loose consortium of developers, politicos, and business leaders…admit they have no idea how much the proposal will cost. The plan is a high-speed road…for the benefit of a handful of powerful developers. It’s a highway scheme masquerading as a parks and recreation plan” (134). Even with such criticism, Dillon maintains focus on the plan, not the people, at least not specific people—and the quality of his prose, his critical eye, and his political navigation skills summed to make him a model for any public intellectual, regardless of scale.

All of this begs an important question—why should we care about one man’s view of how a city should operate? Because Dallas cared—intellectuals, the monied, public officials, yuppies who desired to live in a cosmopolitan setting—they all, in some way, respected and admired Dillon. Over decades of writing about Dallas, Dillon seemed to embody what the locals wished for the city—status and culture combined with professional success. The most obvious example of this is the fact that Dillon’s papers are now housed at the University of Texas-Arlington in a center that bears his name—the David Dillon Center for Architecture is a testament to the ongoing conversation in Dallas about the role of architecture in public life, a conversation that, because of his impact, largely happens in the context of Dillon’s words. Dillon’s writing, and Katyn Holliday’s editing of it, remind us that there must be careful watchers of the collisions that happen on the seam where public projects and private money meet. This book is an example of the fourth estate at its best. Not moralizing, not virtue-signaling, but compelling description, subtle perception, and the ability to capture the imagination via character, narrative, and gorgeous prose. David Dillon, as he is in his writing at least, was a model citizen civically, artistically, and ontologically. 

Biography

Hayden Bergman is a poet and translator, as well as a Ph.D. candidate at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is also the Reviews Editor for this journal.

© 2020 Hayden Bergman, used by permission

Technoculture Volume 10-11 (2020-2021)