It’s seven in the morning and the sounds of excitement are already deafening. Synchronized volunteers assemble tools, mounds of dirt tower above the horizon, and the morning sun highlights a long list of tasks. For the teachers, the garden will be key to the academic success of their students. For the students, it’s a good… Read more »
Posts Tagged: Dallas
We’d like to introduce Barrett Doherty from the University of Pennsylvania, recipient of The Cultural Landscape Foundation Fellowship. He’s just completing his fourth week in Dallas and will be moving on to the Houston office to finish the second half of his work. SWA: Thanks for taking a few minutes to have a discussion with… Read more »
We’d like to introduce Barrett Doherty from the University of Pennsylvania, recipient of The Cultural Landscape Foundation Fellowship. He’s just completing his fourth week in Dallas and will be moving on to the Houston office to finish the second half of his work.
SWA: Thanks for taking a few minutes to have a discussion with us. Please give us a brief introduction to The Cultural Landscape Foundation Fellowship program and its purpose.
Barrett: A major focus of the Cultural Foundation’s mission is the “What’s Out There?” database. It attempts to spotlight and encourage people to utilize and enjoy some of the significant landscapes that exist around them. The goal is to publicize these landscapes on a number of levels, be it for researchers, scholars, or the public. It is also meant as a visual database for designers.
SWA: What goals do you have for the Fellowship that may not be related to the TCLF objectives?
Barrett: One of my personal projects over the last few years has been promoting U.S.-based work on Landezine.com. The world map on that site shows a tremendous concentration of projects in Europe and not many in the United States. I got really tired of looking at a map that was essentially stating that all of the quality work is in Europe when we all know that’s not true. So, one of my projects has been to contact designers of landscapes that I feel represent the best of US design and encourage them to submit to Landezine.com. Often times, this has led me to volunteer my photographic talents to ensure high-quality images. The U.S. is extremely underrepresented and I have been pushing representative projects, mostly in Philadelphia and New York, which is where I was based during graduate school. So, the Fellowship actually dovetails with my intentions of getting a greater number of contemporary projects submitted to Landezine.
SWA: Of the TCLF-required project visitations, which did you enjoy the most?
Barrett: North Park Center. It really asks some interesting questions: Is a commercial retail experience a public landscape? Are malls a new frontier in landscape architecture that have not been fully developed? Does landscape architecture end at the wall? Essentially architects tend to think of form and structure but in landscape you are invoking nature. When you look at the plantings, they are highly architectural, they almost become postmodern. They are art pieces, highly structural and organic shapes that become strong through the power of repetition. The concept of public art in the landscape and how it creates focal points is very present in North Park Center. It was originally an “L” shape building and at some point they turned it into a square with an interior courtyard. The courtyard and design by MESA are the centerpiece of the interior of the mall. There is a moment where a particular fountain was removed from Lawrence Halprin’s original design and the distinctive base was used as a planter by Mesa for their intervention. It has become a palimpsest of layering of the design. I tend to look at these developments from a more contemporary angle. Landscape has really come into its own over the last thirty-five years and it has almost eclipsed architecture as the pre-eminent field of the urban. It is no longer subservient to architecture. There has been a fundamental shift in the power dynamics and the power of our field.
SWA: During your time in Dallas, what has been your favorite built landscape architectural work?
Barrett: Well, one is Fountain Place because I’m highly interested in the experience of landscape. I try to show this in my photography and I often have people in my pictures so you can understand how a space is used. You step into the space, which is much cooler than the street, and within five steps you forget you are in the city. You see the Bald Cypress canopy, with a feathery and delicate texture, which really creates an ethereal space. The Texas sun is pretty relentless and all of the sudden you step across this threshold and you are enveloped in this blue, green, and cool space. The I.M. Pei building almost disappears. In my opinion the building makes the space feel bigger. It’s interesting because you walk in there and the building wall almost becomes inversed. Normally the wall is the limit, physically and visually; somehow Dan Kiley inverted it. That really is an amazing feat. Also the fact that it is a mature landscape is very interesting. When you think about it, most of us will rarely see contemporary landscapes mature. Landscapes require time and maintenance. That is a big issue; many landscapes are not maintained and do not get mature to completely express the designer’s full intention.
The other is Klyde Warren Park. My friend is the executive director of the Dallas Arts District. So through her, I have met a number of people, not designers, who are very civic-minded. Speaking with them I get a different perspective on my fellowship. They look at a park differently and I hear what they think is important. They look at it much more experientially. Klyde Warren Park has regenerated Downtown Dallas. My friend would argue that it is merely a crowning jewel in a succession of events, but for most people it is the achievement and all of a sudden downtown Dallas is activated. I hear they are getting 30,000 visitors a weekend. To me this is really interesting because people look at it and think it is great. It is nice to hear other people notice the power of landscape to transform. Woodall Rogers had ripped apart downtown Dallas and now you can go from one side to the other. It eliminated this psychological barrier and speaks to me about the power of landscape architecture. Unlike buildings, parks survive because of their own merits. Klyde Warren, like the Katy Trail, is beloved; it’s been adopted by the city. There is no question how Dallasites feel about these projects. No one would dare take them away from them and that’s great.
SWA: You have a very interesting resume. How did you make the transition from the Navy, to professional photographer to landscape architecture?
Barrett: This is something I’ve grappled with– how do the dots connect? I was originally posted to an aircraft carrier in Japan. So all of a sudden, having never traveled outside of the country, I was fully immersed in the both the foreign culture of the Navy and Japan. One day, steaming South of Guam, while on watch, I see two volcanoes in the distance and a gigantic pod of dolphins approaching off the port side and pulling across the bow of the ship. It was a special moment. I am thinking: I have to share this– how do I do it? Being in Japan further piqued my interest, so I picked up a camera. Japan was so different on a fundamental level and in an urban sense, so I started to document it, hoping that my experiences could be shared. Photography became a tool to express myself and I just kept going. I moved to New York to learn studio photography and worked for eight years professionally shooting commercial photography for food, architecture, fashion, interiors, and exteriors. So after immersing myself in photography in NYC, I realized that I’m really interested in natural light and the outside. A confluence of these interests crystallized when I first saw the soon-to-be High Line from above while working in a studio building on the west side of Manhattan. This was before the redevelopment, when Joel Sternfeld, one of my favorite photographers, was documenting it to seed ideas for the High Line Park. In this moment before the design competition, there was this buzz and I became fascinated with it and the potential of what kind of park it could become. So my interest in landscape architecture grew. For me, it really became this idea of creating the landscape image, rather than finding it.
SWA: About your experience as a professional photographer: Do you have a particular focus in your photography of the landscape? How do you see it differently than a typical person?
Barrett: Landscape photography to me is about distilling the essence. I like to see it all and pick out the right details to express. I tend to look for the experience of the place and sometimes the detail. If it’s a detail, it sits within a context of other things. But I tend to like pictures with people in them because that shows the experience. I’ve come to realize that people are an important part of the scene. When shooting for landscape architects, I use people to power the landscape image and as compositional elements. It’s about balance and effectively controlling what is being shown. How do I distill this into its most salient essentials? The bottom line, as a professional, is to create an image that sells the client’s vision. I was taught in New York that you only get three seconds. The viewer will decide if they like your photo in three seconds. That’s your selling time. I want people to think “Wow this is an amazing place, I want to be there.”
SWA: One last burning question: You’ve been attending school in the City of Brotherly Love and now you’re deep in the heart of Texas: BBQ or Cheesesteak?
Barrett: Sushi…Japanese food is truly genius.
For more information on The Cultural Landscape Foundation and Barrett’s fellowship, visit: http://tinyurl.com/lrcdt39
Image courtesy of Barrett Doherty
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Posted by Andy Harcar and Jean Pierre Casillas
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The Katy Trail is a recent Rails-to-Trails project transforming an abandoned rail corridor into a hugely popular pedestrian-bicycle corridor linking over 20 neighborhoods in Dallas, Texas. As a networked infrastructure, this transformation has responded to an urban populace hungry for access to open space. With a strong design vision unifying its entire 3.5-mile length of… Read more »
The Katy Trail is a recent Rails-to-Trails project transforming an abandoned rail corridor into a hugely popular pedestrian-bicycle corridor linking over 20 neighborhoods in Dallas, Texas. As a networked infrastructure, this transformation has responded to an urban populace hungry for access to open space.
With a strong design vision unifying its entire 3.5-mile length of obsolete infrastructure, this urban park has catalyzed an upsurge in local property values and established new venues for civic life at distinctive plazas, outlooks and access points.
As locals like to say…“The trains don’t run here anymore….Dallas does.”
Constructed in 1870, the Katy Railway provided the primary rail connection from Dallas to the East Coast. After termination of service a century later, the rail line deteriorated into a public eyesore that divided Dallas’ core and contributed to urban decay.
Today a portion of that earlier abandoned corridor forms the vibrant Katy Trail: a 3.5-mile pedestrian and bicycle trail system and linear park that links 95 acres of Dallas parklands along the Turtle Creek greenbelt. Running through the most densely developed section of Dallas, this park connects several important districts and links residents to shopping, jobs, entertainment venues and university destinations. It also provides a major recreational destination for the more than 300,000 people who live and work within a mile of the trail and numerous others from across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
Design:
The sheer scale and vast resources spent on network infrastructure present tremendous opportunities to leverage unrealized potential in the urban environment. Katy Trail extends from north downtown Dallas to the University Park neighborhood near Southern Methodist University following the route of the railway and connecting to urban parks. The project includes four major accessible (ADA compliant) entrances, three major connections, ten additional ADA entrances, and seven stair entrances.
A strong design vision unifies all project elements and promotes the central goals of the master plan:
- To create a safe and easily accessible trail system,
- To celebrate the history and natural environment of the area,
- To promote community involvement and stewardship, and
- To establish a beautiful urban city park.
Working with the non-profit Friends of Katy Trail and in collaboration with the City of Dallas, SWA started by helping to change public perceptions of the unused, overgrown, and unmaintained rail right-of-way known primarily for gangs and drug dealers. With input from an extensive community outreach process, they established the larger vision of connecting individual City parks into a single linear system. They also extended the city’s original two-mile long, 12-foot wide concrete path to include an additional 1.5 miles and added a 6-foot wide padded running trail for 2.5 miles.
Key Project Elements
The master plan became a built reality through years of study, design and phased implementation.
Knox Henderson Intersection – The first public entrance completed, this project contains two 40-foot square plazas flanking the busy Knox Street intersection. Free-standing native limestone seat walls form the plazas and provide a visual clue to users approaching the road crossing. Detailed pavement, donor benches, interactive art, lighting, plantings of Mexican Plum trees, flowering trees and shrubs, and ornamental grasses enliven the plazas and create a resting place off the trail. The Knox Henderson public plazas became the cornerstones of the trail’s new image and the standard for future entrance designs.
American Airlines Overlook – In 2004, Hillwood Development developed the American Airlines Center and Victory Park at the far south end of the trail. Thanks to their donation, the Friends of Katy Trail were able to complete a portion of the trail from the entertainment venue to the overlook at Reverchon Park. The landscape architect designed Victory Overlook and the trailhead at Lyte Street connecting to Victory Park, a new major residential/entertainment district. Native limestone blocks distinguish the overlook and serve functional needs for retention.
Reverchon Overlook – This access point connects to historic Reverchon Park, which traces its origins to the WPA era. The privately-funded project includes a prominent overlook of native limestone blocks, a large galvanized steel trellis covered with trumpet vine (Campsis radicans), shaded seating, water fountains for both human and canine users, and litter receptacles. The design includes a 750-foot long ADA compliant ramp and a staircase connecting to the 36-acre Reverchon Park below. In the park itself, Briggs Freeman Plaza incorporates two stone benches and stonework replicating the WPA-era relics found nearby. This access ramp also provides easy trail access from nearby Scottish Rite Hospital for Children.
Snyder’s Union /Carlisle Entry – This overlook/entry includes a plaza and access to the trail from Carlisle Street. The dramatic ellipse-shaped plaza and glass observation platform cantilever beyond the rail bed and over the park located some 18 feet below, offering a unique vantage point toward Lee Park and Turtle Creek. The guardrail consists of 24 six-inch thick Korean Sage granite slabs angled at 15 degrees. Opposite the observation platform, the trellis of sandblasted architectural concrete is capped by African Mahogany timbers. Five solid Korean Sage granite benches represent the five-decade marriage and five family members of private donors who funded this most recent project along the Katy Trail.
The Katy Trail rediscovers a hidden and neglected part of Dallas by revitalizing an infrastructural corridor. This regenerative urban park has revitalized local neighborhoods, spurred an increase in retail/ restaurant sales, and improved the vitality of wildlife habitat and mature trees that dominate the scene. A healthy new green ribbon now follows the footprint of Dallas’ historic railway, converting an eyesore to destination for generations to come.
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Posted by The Katy Trail Team
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