Quote:
Originally Posted by weatherguru18
What happened to Dallas? I've seen nursing homes livelier than this thread. I don't understand why Dallas isn't playing the game like its sisters to the south.
Dallas' skyline is dated, small, and increasingly more squatty as taller buildings rise in...Austin of all places. The skyline feels stuck in time compared to Houston and Austin--both of which are putting up high-rises, or in Houston's case, many are going up at the same time including the RO (two 35+ story buildings), the Ritz (44-stories), the St. Regis (40+ stories), plus others that are planned.
I realize the Metroplex is a conglomerate of many small cities that make up one large area, with the principle city, Dallas, being only half the size of Houston. However, I still think that North Texas, specifically Dallas, should be able to support trophy towers of mixed use style and nothing can seem to get off the ground. Its always baffling driving in from Houston or Austin to see just how dinky the Dallas skyline is.
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Yes as Urbannizer pointed out the reason this thread is so quiet is because we have a separate forum a lot of us use to discuss Dallas projects. But I had no idea it had become walled off to new users recently... the place has always struggled with bots which might be why. I'll try to contribute more to this thread.
Dallas's urban core has been having a building boom like the rest but it's been a boom of high rises not skyscrapers.
I love this particular video for the surreal lighting, but it highlights how much the urban center has expanded horizontally rather than vertically. Basically 80% of what you see from 0:13 seconds and onward didn't exist 15-20 years ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dallas/comments/1mfe6f9/landing_at_love_tonight/
I mean, this is what it looked like just in 2001! It's become a completely different city within our lifetimes, and this "After" photo is already five years out of date and missing multiple towers.
But all of the high rises are having a strange effect on how the skyline looks.
Here is the skyline in 2008 (Google streetview, so apologies for the shite quality). As your eye traces the horizon, downtown feels like a steep and sudden rise out of nothingness.
Compare that to the exact same view in 2025:
Suddenly the skyline seems shorter! It's gotten longer, sure, but somehow frumpier and more stocky. Flattened. But it's not like we lobbed off the top of the towers in downtown. It's still just as tall as it's always been, but all of the highrises added to uptown have managed to dampen the visual impact of the CBD and make it seem shorter than it used to.
It's that weird psychological effect where, for example, Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs will look very different if you put him in a room full of grade schoolers versus a room full of NBA players. His height doesn't change but the perception of his height changes. Dallas's CBD no longer looks like it sprung out of the middle of a pasture. (Go Spurs!)
Quote:
Originally Posted by JoninATX
I don't agree with Dallas being smaller than Austin. Not by a long shot.
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Yes all of the growth in Austin has been fantastic but the aerial view of them both really highlights the gulf that still exists. Austin's growth has been a thin (but indeed very tall) strip along the river (yes yes Town Lake). This makes it look huge but the density begins dropping off a cliff when you walk just a few blocks away from the river.
Dallas on the other hand is a contiguous 2-mile long blob of density stretching from city hall to Turtle Creek. The density is clustered in a spherical shape, rather than a long strip like Austin's, so there's no singular impressive view where Dallas's skyscrapers are all lined up like ducks in row in the way Austin's is from the waterfront. It does make Austin's very impressive looking though.
But I suppose the ultimate question is why
hasn't Dallas built a new supertall and more skyscrapers then? I don't know, I don't really think the market has justified it, so I don't think it's been something Dallas has been lacking. Dallas is doing what I had been hoping they would do which is prioritize expanding the urban core rather than just making the existing one taller. Downtown Dallas flies under the radar because it gets overshadowed by the heights going up in Austin and Houston, but Dallas's urban core remains the most densely populated in Texas and has only been growing all this time.
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