When I tell you that simply going into the parking garage at Dallas City Hall was the most thrilling thing I had ever experienced, I’m not kidding. It was March 1978, just after my 14th birthday. I put on a coat and tie and accompanied my parents to the opening of City Hall.
The scale of the space, the light as we ascended into the hall, even the sound of the car door echoing in the underground. In Texas, we always build on top of things. But this — the ability to construct below the Earth — I was gobsmacked. It was simply thrilling.
Then we stepped out onto the plaza and the whole vision unfolded: a public gathering space for “we the people.”
I stood at the foundation of City Hall, the concrete building blocks that reached overhead and out to the citizens, creating a covered front porch with windows that reflected the citizenry. On the expansive plaza, there was a reflecting pool, floating sculpture on the water, and Henry Moore’s Three Forms Vertebrae sculpture, which stood like the skeletal backbone of the city. And though, to a 14-year-old boy awed on opening day, I thought the forms were Henry Moore’s bones, the massive sculpture gave me a visceral attachment to my city on a monumental scale.
After more than a decade of conversation about civic architecture and design — some of which I heard around our dining table as my own familial civics lesson — Dallas City Hall was born…