Outdoor Adventures 
Architecture
Suburban Renewal
North of Dallas, urban planners and developers are battling soulless sprawl with designs that aim to build a spirit of community.
(Page 2 of 2)
Yet these illustrations don’t look much like the traditional Texas small town—which is the point, Stebbins tells me. Since most of Southlake’s residents are from other parts of the country, Southlake Town Square will reflect a broad range of styles. “The goal is to evoke small towns across America,” he says. “It’s not meant to look like a Midwest small town, Texas small town, Colorado small town, or North Carolina small town. It’s meant to have pieces of all those towns.” Photographs on the conference room’s walls illustrate this patchwork concept. There are snapshots of downtown storefronts, water fountains, city parks, and such, but you’re not sure where each is actually located. One is a sentimental favorite of the 41-year-old Stebbins: a courthouse in his grandparents’ hometown of Washington, Iowa.
The illustrations lining Stebbins’ office walls suggest not only Southlake’s future but the past it never had. A real downtown consists of many buildings, each built at a different time, each aging differently, each with its own history. Stebbins proudly presents me with samples of the bricks that are being used to construct the town square’s facades. Each will have its own type of brick, furthering the illusion of history. “We don’t try in our design of the buildings to ape history,” says Schwarz, “but rather to combine a series of forms that people can recognize and embrace.”
When Stebbins gives me a tour of the town square’s site, the facades of some of the buildings have just been put up. The effect is of many separate buildings, equal parts Hollywood set and Old West town. But in reality, the town square is mainly made up of several large buildings with multiple facades. I comment that a corner art deco–style facade is my favorite. Stebbins smiles; after all, there’s supposed to be a building to suit every taste.
Way north of Dallas-Fort Worth, on 900 acres of prairie near Denton, the people behind the Big Sky development want to present a reality that is far removed from the suburbs—a concept that could be called the “new ruralism.” Big Sky’s developers are banking on the preservation of the North Texas prairie as the foundation for a new community, many of whose members will buy an acre of prairie (for approximately $50,000) and build a house in the middle of it. “The layout of the prairie preserve was done very sensitively, to allow each person a direct view of the horizon,” says the development’s 40-year-old landscape architect, Kevin Sloan. “If residents prefer a more townlike setting, they can buy a house or townhouse in the town [portion] of Big Sky.” Everyone will help decide how the community property will be used throughout the seasons—whether crops should be grown on it, for example, and what kind.
Why would anybody, especially a suburbanite, want to sign up for this? To experience the beauty and tranquillity of the open range, say the developers. “Big Sky is about owning your horizon,” says Peter Malin, a 47-year-old economist and developer who is one of its creators. “We were looking for a solution to the question of how to preserve the native Texas landscape and at the same time develop it.”
Sloan’s partner, Dallas architect Max Levy, is responsible for Big Sky’s architectural guidelines. “We drive through north-central Texas, through prairie lands, and most of us, whether we realize it or not, are touched by a sense of yearning and loss,” Levy says. “We yearn for this landscape to succeed in some lovely way, but we’re overcome by a sense of loss, having seen this landscape bulldozed away.” His attachment to the Texas prairie has its roots in his childhood. Though Levy, who is 51, grew up “in a typical Leave It to Beaver fifties neighborhood” on the western edge of Fort Worth, his family’s house looked out onto undeveloped ranchland. “That view out the kitchen window, of the distant ranchland, was mesmerizing,” he recalls.
But does “owning your horizon,” the polar opposite of suburban sprawl, have any practical appeal? After all, Big Sky residents will have to drive to Denton or Decatur for most of their shopping needs. And for many, the prairie evokes images of isolation and loneliness. “I think it’s possible to achieve the same housing density in a prairie setting that you typically have in a residential neighborhood and yet still preserve a sense of prairie,” says Levy. Adds Sloan, “The town is going to be much more tight than what you find in your usual suburban sprawl. That’s compensated for by the more rural lots out in the prairie.”
Levy’s design guidelines for Big Sky’s one- and two-story prairie houses aim to keep them small and their style spartan: White and gray are the dominant colors, and the materials are brick, limestone, wood siding, and for the roofs, corrugated sheet metal—in essence, the materials used for building barns. Big Sky’s architectural philosophy is “to build simply in a simple landscape,” Levy says. “Out on the prairie, anything you build is silhouetted against the horizon. When you build a complicated form, your pleasure in looking out at the horizon gets tangled up.”
Levy, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, had his graduate architecture students design houses for Big Sky; their models were exhibited at the Arlington Museum of Art last summer. Some of them look, as expected, like barns, though larger and with a modern feel. Others, with their use of trees and small outbuildings in addition to the main house, are adept examples of achieving harmony with the prairie environment. In some of the models the bedrooms, kitchen, living room, and garage occupy separate buildings, connected by breezeways. And all of the models adhere to Big Sky’s credo that no building should distract the viewer’s attention from the prairie landscape.
Malin has invited me to a dinner party he’s throwing on the Big Sky prairie for a couple who will be the development’s first residents. On the ten-mile drive from Denton, the surroundings become increasingly desolate as buildings give way to expanses of open prairie. Once I arrive, standing in the midst of the prairie, I notice how remarkably pleasant the weather is. Despite highs in the upper 90’s, the breeze cools things down considerably.
Jim and Carolyn Clark, a Dallas couple approaching retirement age, are Big Sky’s pioneers. At the dinner party, Jim Clark, a businessman who runs his own company, tells me about his vision for their new house on the prairie. The Camp, as he likes to call it, will be designed by Levy and consist of separate buildings to afford maximum privacy for its residents and their guests.
He describes their main house in a tony Dallas neighborhood as “international style, modern, very reminiscent of the Bauhaus and European architecture of the thirties”; it sounds fairly high-maintenance. Their second home at Big Sky will be its antithesis. “It will be extremely modern but have influences of traditional Texas farm- and ranch-type architecture,” Clark says. Most important, the Camp will expose its residents and guests to the outside elements. If it’s raining, you’ll get wet as you move from the bedroom to the kitchen, because, he says, that’s the way things should be out on the prairie. Suburban life in North Texas is too insulated, he feels—people move from an air-conditioned house to an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned office building. It’s not going to be that way at the Camp, Clark tells me, sounding almost gleeful.
I’m not sure whether I can see the future of the North Texas exurban landscape as prairie dotted with “camps,” but Malin and his partners are right about one thing: The view out here is beautiful. Sitting in lawn chairs, we watch the sun set, and as the stars come out, I have a sense of isolation. This time, though, it’s not a feeling of desolation but one of calm.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
