Dallas Architecture Blog discusses Modern architecture and Mid Century Modern
Homes, Dallas Neighborhoods, Dallas Real Estate and the Aesthetics of the City.

David Hocker landscape design

A brilliantly designed home will always be a fabulous home. A talented landscape architect can add even more context, texture and meaning to an architect-designed home.

Landscape Architecture vs. Landscape Allowance

Many think of landscapes as a “builder allowance” of a few thousand dollars for some hedgerows, foundation plantings and flower beds that serve as mitigating ornamentation. However, I’ve developed quite a different opinion having seen the work of great landscape architects in Dallas, such as the legendary Arthur and Marie Berger, and Thomas Church, as well as current landscape architects such as Armstrong-Berger, David Hocker, David Rolston, Kevin Sloan, Harold Leidner, Michael Kinler, Seeing their work in context to architecturally significant homes, it’s clear that these architects help accentuate the design of the home and give the home context in the same way a natural setting such as a mountain or a lake defines the essence of a residence.

David Hocker Wins Two American Society of Landscape Architects Awards

The Power House

Two excellent examples of the collaboration of a landscape architect (David Hocker) and an architect (Gary Cunningham) are the Power House in Dallas and the Pool House in Highland Park. The combination of these two talents and disciplines created extraordinary results.

Landscape architect David Hocker recently won two American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Awards for these projects. Usually these landscape awards go to architects who design in the mountains or along the ocean on the West Coast or in the verdant and forested East Coast. David Hocker won for these two landscape designs: The Power House, a 1930s former commercial structure renovated for residential use, and The Pool House in Highland Park, a new urban retreat for an artist and for a car collector who resided next door. The landscape of The Power House softens the hard edge of the commercial structure with native plants, but maintains the sense of urbanity with its strong structural elements.

Gary Cunningham Designs Highland Park Pool House

Gary Cunningham was commissioned to design The Pool House that would function as an artist’s studio, a gallery for cars, a family space, guesthouse and a space for large social gatherings. The desire was to quietly insert a modern home into an opulent, traditional neighborhood. This was accomplished by subtly placing it at the rear of the lot, behind a stainless steel wall illuminated from within. Also, this modern two-story box has 5,250 square feet, which is similar in mass to the original Highland Park estate homes. The combined size of this freestanding addition and the main house also mimics the mass of the new Highland Park homes being built nearby. David Hocker then created a garden design where both houses and lots contributed to the formation of a large garden en masse.

The Pool House

Existing red oaks and elms were included into the design as well as a minimal plant palette that was previously used for texture and privacy. In Texas the great natural asset is the bright sun and blue sky, which beg for glazed walls and an easy transition from indoors and outdoors. Some consider the harsh Texas sun and intense heat an environmental liability. Here you can see how the contributions of David Hocker, the landscape architect, and Gary Cunningham capture the sun and sky and mitigate their often harsh consequences.

The south façade is glazed in frameless, insulated glass incorporating two eight foot wide sliding glass doors. The 14 foot cantilevered roof insulates the interior from the overhead sun and still allows in the low sun and also serves as a porch to the glass tiled infinity edge swimming pool.

Large stone slabs become sinuous connectors throughout the garden and provide the transition from the street to the interior concrete floor of the first floor that extends outside into a deck that surrounds the infinity edge pool. A sunning deck extends out over the pool into the garden. The ipe wood decking complements the ipe wood skin of the pool house. The client’s affinity for blue is incorporated by both architects into meaningful interior and exterior features.

Gary Cunningham and David Hocker designed to the extraordinary taste of their clients and to unique talent of each other. The result is a free-standing addition on an independent lot that is bold and demure in design as it effectively becomes part of the whole.

Modern Architects Select Sites, Landscape Architects Make Their Decision Seem Genius

Great architects are very skillful in picking the best site in a neighborhood. Often an architect-chosen site is one that shows potential but becomes spectacular. The most exhilarating homes are influenced by the site, and accentuated by the landscape architect.

Collaboration of Arthur and Marie Berger and O’Neil Ford Stands Test of Time

O’Neil Ford designed Rock Creek house

Landscape architects Arthur and Marie Berger were great friends and collaborators with architect O’Neil Ford. The Bergers had O’Neil Ford design their small, midcentury home at 3900 Stonebridge, on a bluff overlooking Turtle Creek. It has since been torn down, with a large new house built on the lot. While the new house still has the advantage of a pretty location, this home never had the magic to capture the imagination of the public as did the O’Neil Ford designed Arthur and Marie Berger landscaped designed home. The new home dominates the site; the O’Neil Ford home submitted to the site, which the Bergers subtly influenced with their landscape design.

Around the corner at 3514 Rock Creek, O’Neil Ford and Arthur and Marie Berger collaborated on another home in 1936. On a tucked away street, this home was designed on .6 acres with the land plummeting towards the creek, giving the first floor and second floor windows a view looking down Rock Creek before it joins Turtle Creek. I can imagine the Bergers and O’Neil Ford traipsing through untamed land, evaluating the contours and orientation that resulted in a two-story L shaped house with endless forest views even now when the neighborhood is fully developed.

O’Neil Ford designed Haggerty/Hanley house

One of their most important collaborations with O’Neil Ford was for the Preston Hollow midcentury Texas Modern home designed for the Haggertys.

The Approach of Crespi Estate Declares This Architect Designed Home Most Significant of Its Era

Maurice Fatio designed this home on 22 acres in 1939. He was voted New York’s best architect and was the refined alternative to Mizner in Palm Beach for his beautiful estate homes. A visit to the Crespi Estate is breathtaking. Originally the entrance was from Walnut Hill Lane. Only after the first wide graceful turn on the descending drive did one see a magnificent French style estate home with a motor court flanked by a mature allée of magnolias. A visitor falls in love with the house along the drive that creates a transcending transition from city to estate.

Maurice Fatio designed Crespi Estate

Edward Durell Stone and Thomas Church Were Great Collaborators

Edward Durell Stone designed home

Edward Durell Stone, FAIA, and landscape architect Thomas Church appeared to have designed interior and exterior spaces as one person. The Edward Durell Stone home on Meadowbrook and Park Lane is a perfect example of their seamless work. The courtyards surrounding the home became rooms that provided light, privacy and intimacy for the exterior and interior spaces. The open interior spaces felt like an extension of the exterior. Pools of water were moved inside; a band of water circled the dining room island. A swimming pool became a centerpiece of the living room. Exterior terraces and verandahs became living spaces as one looked into the refreshing and open interiors. Glazed glass walls and hand carved screens blurred the boundaries of interior and exterior as the talent of Thomas Church and Edward Durell Stone blended the boundaries of their respective contributions to this architecturally significant home.

Modern home designed by Edward Durrell Stone

Gary Cunningham, FAIA, and David Hocker – A Contemporary Collaboration

Architect Gary Cunningham is an incredibly talented and accomplished architect known for pushing the envelope, experimenting with design and materials. Both his commercial and residential work has received Dallas and Texas AIA awards throughout two decades. The Pool House in Highland Park is a good example of the landscape architect not competing with the residential architect, but accentuating and helping define the architectural work. David Hocker’s landscape gives further balance and dimension to the architectural design of Gary Cunningham.

Architects Should Submit to the Landscape of the Site. Landscape Architects Should Submit to the Architect.

Michael Kinler landscape design

From my perspective the best houses are the ones that most closely follow the cues from the natural site and the most architecturally significant homes are designed in collaboration with a landscape architect who takes his or her cues from the natural landscape and the architect’s design. Landscape architecture should not call attention to itself or overpower a project. The best landscape architecture calls attention to the environment, anchored by an amazing house.

Every collaboration is approached in different ways and from different points in the process. The very best collaborations occur when the architect and landscape architect share early and often.

O’Neil Ford Influenced the Timeless Architecture of Scott Lyons and Frank Welch

Why are some modern architectural designs (such as the work of O’Neil Ford, FAIA, Scott Lyons, FAIA, and Frank Welch, FAIA) new, progressive and influential while other modern designs seem trendy and tired at the same time?

The Best Architecture for a Site Creates Timeless Design

Timeless modern architecture is inspired by the site, crafted by the finest artisans, and built using the best technology and materials of the time — those that are familiar as well as technologies and materials that have recently become available. Every era has its achievements from which we build, reinterpret and admire. Great design of any period remains great design.

The Haggerty/Hanley House Designed by O’Neil Ford Draws From Past and Influences Future

The Haggerty/Hanley house that architect O’Neil Ford designed in 1957 is a great example of timeless design. This midcentury Texas modern home draws from Ford’s earlier 1930s Texas modern work as well as that of David Williams, FAIA, which combined elements of European modernism and pioneer houses. This home is artfully situated to emphasize the site and orientation of the home in relationship to the sun much like the first Texas modern home David Williams designed in 1933 on McFarlin Boulevard with views of Turtle Creek. The Haggerty/Hanley home is also considered the best combination of Texas modern architecture and Texas modern art.

O’Neil Ford Designed the Haggerty/Hanley Home Almost As If It Were a Village

Architect O’Neil Ford designed the Haggerty/Hanley home in a much larger scale, one that is common today but rare in Dallas at the time. Taking advantage of the beautiful acreage bordered by a creek, O’Neil Ford designed the home almost as if it were a village, much like the early homes of Texas. It is set down from the street, wrapping around the topography with walls of windows in the living areas closest to the creek.

Even when designing in this larger scale, O’Neil Ford drew from his memory of sketching earlier pioneer homes. O’Neil Ford also still relied on the same artisans like his brother Lynn Ford (who did the metal work and wood carvings on O’Neil Ford’s first modern home) for the architectural details on the Haggerty/Hanley home.

O’Neil Ford’s Haggerty/Hanley 1957 Home Directly Influences Architect Scott Lyons’ 1983 Designed Home and Architect Frank Welch’s 2004 Designed Home

O’Neill Ford

Scott Lyons

Frank Welch

The Haggerty/Hanley home reiterates detail and handcrafted artisanship while creating new volumes and uses of materials that influenced great architects like Scott Lyons and Frank Welch who worked with O’Neil Ford and whose later work reflected Ford’s influence.

These three Texas modern homes by O’Neil Ford, Scott Lyons, and Frank Welch were built over a span of 50 years and yet all remain architecturally current and influential. The beautiful estate area acreage and topography drove the design of each of these homes. All three are approximately 10,000 sf, built with steel frame construction, and designed as a series of attached structures with a significant secondary structure.

The O’Neil Ford Designed Haggerty/Hanley Living Room Has Influenced Architects for Over 50 Years

Architects locally and around the country come to see this midcentury modern Texas home and the living room O’Neil Ford designed. Architects admire and absorb the hand carved open wood screen, the continuous walls of soft Mexican brick, the walls of windows overlooking the lawn and sculpture garden as it descends to the creek, the pitched ceiling that gives balance to the spacious dimensions of the space, and the stick ceiling that acoustically softens the room and brings warmth. The floating wall gives separation without impeding the immense openness of the room.

Architect Scott Lyons Reinterprets and Further Modernizes Design Inspired by O’Neil Ford

In 1983 Scott Lyons was selected to design a home on possibly the most beautiful land in Preston Hollow. Like O’Neil Ford, he submitted the design of this modern home to the landscape. Scott Lyons set the house down from the street with the main living room closest to the deep ravine and spring fed creek. The home expands and cleans up the horizontal axis while still retaining the indigenous qualities of the materials and details. An open wood screen shields and announces the living room from the front door. A stick ceiling is not used as a finish, but an exposed ceiling joint on the pitched ceiling dramatizes the precision in which the house was built. The oversized soft Mexican brick complements the warmth of the cross-cut white oak. The wall of floor-to-ceiling windows wraps around the room, providing views of the creek and small lake beyond the garden. While the house almost disappears when viewed from the street, from inside it affords a spectacular view of the beautiful land on which it is set.

Frank Welch Identifies O’Neil Ford Designed Living Room as Room That Inspires Him

Approximately 50 years after O’Neil Ford designed the living room in the Haggerty/Hanley home, Frank Welch designed the living room for this home in the estate area of Bluffview. A wall of windows looking over the garden, a pitched ceiling with a tight pattern of parallel sticks, a floating wall, and cross-cut white oak finishes add depth and polished texture to the room.

Frank Welch does not mimic the past. Frank Welch designs homes that reflect ideas of the past that he advances with new technology, greater precision, proportions that are perfect, and a design that is fresh, exciting, and will influence generations in the future.

Great architects like O’Neil Ford, Scott Lyons, and Frank Welch have designed modern homes that are perfect for the site, beautifully crafted and articulated, and offering a new vision for future generations.

See more information and photographs on this Scott Lyons architect designed home offered for sale.

I often see the same families purchase, renovate or build a succession of increasingly architecturally significant homes. While a person cannot collect homes in the same way that a collector can acquire paintings or sculpture, the instinct is the same. The curiosity, passion and desire to live in and around extraordinary beauty and profound design is the same whether for a collector of art or a patron of architecture. In future blog articles I will discuss some of the great family lineages of owners of significant architect designed homes, both modern and eclectic.

International Style Home

Here we see an International Style home designed for a young couple with five children. The couple hired James Nagle, a graduate of Stanford with an architecture degree from MIT and a co-founder of the Chicago architecture firm Nagle Hartray. Built in 1976, this home in Bent Tree was the finest example of International Style architecture since Stanley Marcus had Roscoe Dewitt design his International Style home in 1937. Set on two acres along a greenbelt, this modern home is sleek, stark and yet comfortable for a family. Some think that clean-lined and hard-edged modern is only appropriate for highrises, urban couples or fastidious style makers. This modern home in Far North Dallas shows that a home can have a compelling design, a pastoral setting, bedrooms for multiple children, expansive yards, gardens, pools and courts to accommodate activities of families and friends. The result is a home dramatic for entertaining, utilitarian for a family and aesthetically attractive through the decades.

The same couple, when the children were grown, again hired architect James Nagle in collaboration with Robert Neylan to design another modern home. This home combined the latest technology, building materials and construction techniques with timeless and more accessible materials and fixtures. Where modern houses are often associated with isolated locations, modern residential parks, or clusters in urban locations, this modern home is right at home in the leafy and traditional suburb of Highland Park.

While the architect was sensitive to the setbacks and scale of the homes designed in a European tradition around them, this home exudes modernity. As you approach the front door you begin to experience a subtle and sublime transformation, a different environment, one that is familiar, but expressed in such a new way. A compilation of stainless steel, teak and granite and Belgian glass continues that aura as you enter. A visitor in the home feels exhilaration and tranquility at the same time. At 10,000 square feet, the size of this Highland Park Translucens House is somewhat larger than the Bent Tree home, but occupies a much smaller parcel of land. As a result, the Highland Park house does not look outward in the same way that the Bent Tree house does, but looks inward into a courtyard. The view of the street is restrained by translucent glass that can be darkened for more privacy Extra bedrooms were eliminated, and additional space was allowed for returning family members in the form of vertically and horizontal open galleries, courtyards, and public spaces bridged by glass and connected by stairs.

Here is an example of two homes created for the same family: same architect, different needs and different settings, but both modern homes that continue to earn appreciation, credibility and applause.

See Bent Tree modern home Future Offering

While cities across the country crumble economically, Dallas will emerge as the nation’s strongest and most exciting city in 2009. In these gloomy times, while the country seems to have so little to cheer about, the nation will notice the great achievements and celebration taking place in Dallas.

Dallas’ growth and success has often surged when times looked bleakest. Since the 1890s, Dallas has surpassed stronger and larger cities. Dallas will be doing this again as the Winspear Opera House and the Wyly Theater open in the Arts District, as Trinity Park emerges and the 50-story, mile-long Santiago Calatrava-designed bridges begin to soar.

Dallas already has the nation’s largest number of corporate headquarters in the U.S. – and this is before the second downtown for Dallas is scheduled to emerge, a mixed-use development with 100-story skyscrapers and single-family, street level housing, located on the 60 acres on the west side of the Trinity.

Dallas Historically Turns Toughest Times to Its Advantage

Historically, Dallas has turned the toughest times to its advantage. In the Depression of 1892, John Armstrong began contemplating Highland Park, which he opened in 1906. In 1900, Main Street was paved with bois d’arc logs and the population was 42,000 people.

In 1910, Dallas was home to less than 100,000 people. By 1930, the city’s population was over a quarter of a million, at 250,000, when the entire country was mired in the Great Depression. In 1936, in the height of the Depression, Dallas became home to the Texas Centennial Exposition because of the lavish Art Deco exhibition buildings, Music Hall and Cotton Bowl that were constructed in Fair Park. By the 1950s, the population was approaching 500,000.

In the 1970s, when the national economy was both stalled and was suffering from inflation, Dallas had the foresight to build the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

The first commercial flight landed at the new DFW on January 13, 1974. The number of flights from DFW has increased ever since. In 2000 DFW was the world’s fifth busiest airport and remains a source of economic growth and employment in the area.

Population in Dallas Will Continue 100 Years of Rapid Growth

Now, while the nation is in a nosedive, Dallas is initiating and completing its biggest projects ever. The exhilaration created by the Arts District, Trinity River Park and surrounding development, and the Calatrava bridges will focus the national spotlight on Dallas and make the city a magnet for great people and growing companies. Dallas will not only emerge as one of the five largest cities in the next 15 years, but as a city inhabited by the most interesting, entrepreneurial and culturally savvy residents.

Turtle Creek Park Now Even Better

Turtle Creek Park, My Favorite Neighborhood

When the late Glenn Mitchell asked me in an interview on KERA Public Radio which neighborhood I would show an out-of-town client first, I replied without hesitation Turtle Creek Park, explaining that to reach this small neighborhood of 37 houses, a person crosses a stone bridge and proceeds up the hill on a winding tree-lined street to explore the architect designed homes framed by the Katy Trail, Rock Creek and Turtle Creek.

Neighborhood of Topography, Trees and Water

Topography, trees and water are the natural attractions of this hidden neighborhood that is walking distance to everyone’s favorite restaurants, parks and cultural attractions.  Now the neighborhood is even better.  The City of Dallas Parks Department participated with the homeowners along Turtle Creek to dredge this wide and now free flowing creek.  Some of the homes are perched high off the creek, others have lawns tapering down to the creek.

Rock Creek descends into Turtle Creek framing home site

One of my favorite homes is sited on two creeks, Rock Creek  as it descends into Turtle Creek.  This English style home with a façade of oversized brick has a strong rustic presence softened by its refined lines and abundance of windows and panoramic views of water, trees, and meandering creeks. 

When Dallas is sometimes confused with endless new homes of the suburbs, it is nice when people new to the city, like the AT&T executives being transferred to Dallas as part of the AT&T corporate headquarters relocation, can see a beautiful example of Dallas a city of distinct neighborhoods, rather than the just viewing the city as an endless, mind numbing tour of houses based on square footage prices.

Landscape architect Dave Rolston and his wife Julie Cohn, an artist and textile designer, recently renovated their modern home on Tokalon Drive located in Lakewood.  This Texas modern home is on a street of Tudor, Georgian and Spanish Colonial homes.  It is always interesting when a single modern home such as this does not stick out on a street of 1920s and 1930s eclectic homes.  Here, the similar and respectful scale and setback of the home contributes to the streetscape.  The landscaping created by Dave Rolston does not hide the home, it accentuates the home while maintaining the visual rhythm of the street. 

Modern homes often are able to create views of verdant gardens or emphasize features of the natural site by the ample employment of windows and by the configuration of the structure to take advantage of the site.  With two artists orchestrating the design and landscape who have resources like architect Max Levy and other pals like architects Frank Welch, Dan Shipley and Ron Wommack, one would expect something special.  I did and it was a real treat when I visited the home Saturday morning.

Landscape Design

Just as Frank Lloyd Wright consistently fiddled with his Oak Park home, using his own residence as a laboratory, Dave Rolston will rework areas of his garden, a small creek will become a pond, sight lines will be improved.  Dave Rolston has created a garden of paths, ponds, quiet sitting areas, terraces and broad lawns for entertaining.  From every approach, new spaces become evident.  There is no single landscape feature that jumps out at you, but a series of pleasing surprises that leave the visitor exhilarated.

 
I might also note architects often find the best sites.  Who would ever know walking down Tokalon that behind this home is a several acre greenbelt separating this rear garden from White Rock Lake Park.