Mark Lamster, maybe the most deeply dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker I know, born in Manhattan in 1969, a man who wears a Yankee cap while leading tours of the Kennedy assassination site in Dealey Plaza, and who told me without hesitation that watching the Knicks win the most recent NBA title made him happier than (as had happened just weeks earlier) winning the Pulitzer Prize, moved to Texas in 2013 to become the architecture critic at the Dallas Morning News. If any locals saw him at first as an outsider, he won them over in fairly short order by, among other gestures of commitment, becoming unimpeachably versed in the city’s—and the state’s—architectural, political, and urban history. (I’ll let him tell you the story of his reaction when a tenured Ivy League architectural historian told him she’d never heard of O’Neil Ford.) When it came time, last year, for local writers to defend I.M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall building as it faced the threat of demolition, nobody in Dallas was surprised that Lamster was the one who most compellingly took up the charge. (The heart of his Pulitzer package was a series of columns on the fate of Pei’s 1978 Brutalist landmark.) In August, Lamster released his third book on architecture, “Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas as Told Through Its Architecture” (Deep Vellum Publishing). Breaking from our usual group-chat subject matter, which tends to start and end with basketball, travel, food, middle age, our kids, and griping about other architecture critics (shhh!), we traded messages this week about his new book. Lamster will be appearing on Tuesday evening, Oct. 6, at the New Canaan Library, for a reading that is part of the Glass House Presents series. I hope to see some of you there!
In a typical Q&A published here or elsewhere, this would be the spot where I add the caveat that what follows has been edited and condensed for clarity. In this case, what follows is our full text exchange. Yes, Mark really does text in all lower-case like that.
Your new book on Dallas and its architecture is called “Welcome to Paradox City.” In a nutshell, what’s the paradox?
it’s not a single paradox, it’s that the city is defined by them. rich/poor. beautiful/ugly. progressive/conservative. but if there is one that defines the place it is that it is at once the most boastful, bragadocious city on the planet (big d!) but also incredibly insecure, always trying to measure itself up to historic cities like new york, chicago, los angeles and also to its texas rivals, houston in particular. dallas is desperate to be considered “world class.”
How does that desperation play out architecturally?
Lamster at Dealey Plaza in 2023. (Note the Yankee hat.) “The tawdry X’s [were] painted (by conspiracy theorists) in the middle of Elm Street to mark the points where bullets struck Kennedy,” he writes in “Welcome to Paradox City”
the city has a tendency to go for trophy objects and take big swings (glamorous cultural buildings, a new convention center) instead of doing the basic things that would really improve its character, most obviously shifting from its focus from the car to the pedestrian. so instead of spending upwards of $4 billion on that convention center, it could fix its disastrous and deadly streets and sidewalks.
The last part sounds just like LA! Except that convention center project is a paltry $2.6 billion. Mere peanuts. I wanted to ask about the structure of the book, which is quite straightforward and at the same time, I think, very smart. It’s basically The Dozen Buildings That Explain Dallas. Well, to be exact, eleven buildings plus two landscapes — Dealey Plaza (considered alongside an infamous adjacent building, the Texas School Book Depository) and Klyde Warren Park. As you and I have discussed before, the review of the discrete building remains the single most efficient delivery system for architecture criticism ever devised, and yet it fell out of fashion over the last couple of decades in favor of a critical focus on urbanism and a broader kind of city-making in the age of climate change: what I call, in my courses on criticism, The Urbanist Turn. You go back to the building as the basic unit of criticism, but then insist on using it as a springboard to take on a slew of wider issues, very much including urbanism and city-making. How did you settle on the structure, and on the chosen 12?
my greatest pleasure as a writer is narrative storytelling. so each chapter here is what i call a biography of a building — so not just a critical analysis — but a story about the people who built it and the moment in history of its construction. in a way, this is how i approach any critical assignment, though when you’re writing a critical newspaper column you're a bit more constrained. the idea was to choose one project from every period in the city’s history, so you proceed chronologically from its founding on to the present day (and then out to the future in the coda, which is my attempt at dystopian fiction). the framework forced some difficult decisions about the buildings to include.
The shadow cast by a Woofus at Fair Park in Dallas. According to Lamster, “The Woofus has a hog’s body, a turkey’s tail feathers, a duck’s wings, the neck of a horse, the head of a sheep, and the ten-foot-long, chrome-tipped longhorns of the state’s namesake cattle.” It is, for him, a symbol of the singular qualities that make up Dallas: “You can love it or hate it, but it is surely its own special thing”
And that’s why you include five short appendices, to make room for the long list—for buildings that almost made the cut?
exactly. And also, I felt that this would allow you to use the book as something of a guide book to the city.
A lot of us—you and me and NYRA’s Sammy Medina, to name three—have been thinking about whether we might try to reinvent the architectural guidebook, the way Paul Goldberger, Charles Moore, and others did in the 1970s and ‘80s with the great City Observed series, which sadly never got beyond New York, Boston, and LA. I once even taught a course on this subject at SCI-Arc, which is maybe like teaching needlepoint at Space X. Do you think the model you settled on for the book is applicable to other cities?
first of all, that city observed series is terrific. donlyn lyndon’s boston edition is absolutely brilliant. he should get more attention as a critical writer. and for sure i think the format is applicable elsewhere. i mean, as long as i get royalties, right? right? right?
We’ll have to ask Paul how that turned out for him. Meanwhile, you appeared in Punch List last November, talking about the threat to Dallas City Hall. What’s the latest?
Lamster, who wrote a 2018 biography of Philip Johnson, “The Man in the Glass House,” photographing Johnson’s 1970 Kennedy Memorial in Dallas. In his new book, perhaps even understating the case, he calls it “a drab concrete box” that “has never captured the public’s imagination”
the latest is that the movement to save the building has launched a campaign for a ballot initiative that would leave the future of city hall to a public vote, and the public — according to every survey — appears to be very much opposed to the idea of leaving and or demolishing it. the save movement seems to be growing in stature, has new excellent leadership in the person of former mayor laura miller (nb: dallas has had three female jewish mayors) and has strong financial backing. that being said, the city bureaucracy is still pushing the abandon option, and the majority of the current city council is also in that camp. so very much an open question what will happen.
A few months after that Punch List cameo, you won a (well deserved) Pulitzer Prize in criticism for a series of columns anchored by pieces defending Pei’s building. Then, just a few weeks later, your beloved Knicks won the NBA championship (validating, by the way, my earlier group-chat declaration that they’d never win one with Tom Thibodeau as head coach). You told me without hesitation that the Knicks title was more thrilling for you than the Pulitzer. Are you ready to repeat that statement for the record?
look, the pulitzer is amazing, don’t get me wrong. but i try not to derive my self worth and professional validation from awards. that’s not a healthy practice. and i can assure you that when i learned about it, as excited as i was, i wasn’t jumping around and yelling like an idiot maniac. which i definitely was after the knicks won. so i guess my answer is KNICKS IN 5.
News & Notes
“Life safety—big concern.” The Washington Post provides some of the backstory of Donald Trump’s falling out with his original ballroom architect, James McCrery, amid worries that the project is skirting code requirements and other safety protocols.
Ezra Klein interviews Debbie Millman about ugliness, Cybertrucks, Gen Z fashion, and the “drab sublime.”
On Oct. 17, the Yale School of Architecture will host “Putting Architecture in Its Place,” a daylong symposium on Robert A.M. Stern’s scholarship, teaching, and built work.
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