I’ve made my position on the idea of tearing down a 50-year-old I.M. Pei building so we can build a new stadium/arena/ice rink/rich people party barge clear: Dallas does a poor job of taking care of its properties. Buildings aren’t actually supposed to be disposable. If you take care of them—not to sound like the Mom I am—they can last quite a while. After all, the City Hall before this one is still standing and in use. We can’t keep building with the idea that we can just rip it down later. It’s silly, for one. For two, it’s expensive. But so is not taking care of a building until you’re forced to: Deferred maintenance costs on the city’s portfolio are ballooning, something we explored in our August issue. Next week, City Council will begin noodling with the idea of tearing down Dallas’s roughly 50-year-old city hall to build an arena for the Mavericks.
On Thursday, Mark Lamster, the Dallas Morning News’ architecture critic, ripped apart the idea of demolishing City Hall to make way for a basketball arena. “Of all the irresponsible, ill-conceived, short-sighted, counter-productive, cynical, philistine and downright dumb ideas I’ve heard in my time writing about Dallas, the prospect of razing City Hall stands alone,” he writes. “Demolishing architect I.M. Pei’s iconic building would be an act of epic mismanagement indefensible on aesthetic, environmental, financial or moral grounds.”
But you know, fine. Say we do tear it down. Where do we put the new City Hall? One reason the land is so attractive, presumably, is that it’s valuable, especially since it will be next to the soon-to-be rebuilt Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. But a lot of the land in downtown is valuable. A lot of the land in Dallas is more expensive than it was in 1972. And construction costs have not decreased since 1972, when construction began on the current building—ask builders and developers. (Lamster does a good job of explaining that, too.)…