CITY OF DAVID

D Magazine, Aug 01, 2001 by Bowden, Jeff

AT TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, DEVELOPER BRYAN STEBBINS LOCKS his office door and walks outside. He zips his jacket against the cold. There are rumors of rain. Stebbins' face is slack; his friends tell him he looks awful. He's been holed up in his office for months with partners, architects, contractors, potential tenants, and city officials, all of whom finally bought into the dream. But it's hard for him to remember, as he passes under the banner advertising the grand opening parade scheduled for the next morning, just whose dream it wits to build a brand-new town in the middle of a cow pasture in Southlake, using an urban grid laid out by Washington architect David Schwarz.

Stebbins crosses Main Street to the square that gives the development its name: Southlake Town Square. He has copied it, fountain and all, from his favorite square in Savannah. The Southlake square is lined with two-story, brick and masonry buildings, all of which are designed by Schwarz. They appear architecturally to have been built piecemeal over the course of a century. They include retail shops, restaurants, and second-floor offices. The store shelves are all stocked; the window displays are ready. Stebbins looks down at the flowers lining the walkway. Frost wiped out the first batch. He picks a bench near the fountain and plops down, spent. Without intending to, he replays the previous four years in his head-it has taken that long. He thinks about the parade. It'll be the first in Southlake's short, suburban history. Surely 650 people will show up, he reassures himself. There are that many people in the parade itself. But will there be anyone there to cheer?

Eventually Stebbins drags himself home. He sleeps for three hours and returns to the square at dawn. Almost immediately people start arriving in excited clumps: the parade staff in matching t-shirts, neighborhood kids on bikes and floats, city and county dignitaries. Contractors and subcontractors bring their whole families. By noon, 10,000 people are celebrating. But what?

IN DESIGNING SOUTHLAKE, which opened on March 20, 1999, David Schwarz achieved the same sense of familiarity, scale, and comfort that contributed to the overwhelmingly successful openings of The Ballpark in Arlington (1994) and Bass Performance Hall (1998) in Fort Worth. This year two new Schwarz-designed projects will open in Dallas: the American Airlines Center on July 28th, and in October, the West Village just north of Uptown. Both projects, as well as Schwarz's extensive work in downtown Fort Worth, form his continuing answer to three problems in post-war Texas development: bad urban planning, bad urban architecture, and an almost unmanageable suburban sprawl. Through the patronage of such names as Bass, Perot, Miller, and Hicks, David Schwarz has been handed an opportunity few architects or urban designers will ever know: to reshape a region's thinking about how its buildings relate to people.

Schwarz is a man of clearly defined ideas. "The response that you end traffic by building more roads is simply incorrect," Schwarz says from the offices of his 40-person architectural firm in Washington, D.C. "It doesn't work, and we should know very clearly that it doesn't work because we've been doing it for so long.

"What you have to do is shorten travel distances, decrease the number of trips, and encourage certain sorts of density," he continues. "When I first came to Texas, one of my clients told me that Texans didn't walk. It totally disturbed me. I tried to figure out why and concluded that no one had given them anywhere to walk to. We became very interested in disproving that old Texas maxim. All of our work has been geared toward creating and fostering places for people to walk."

Schwarz labels his architectural style "neo-eclectic," because it incorporates the highest and best elements of the past with current thinking and technology. Schwarz's Bass Hall, for instance, draws its inspiration from the traditional 17th-century Viennese opera house.

Schwarz, now 50, often talks about standing on the shoulders of those who have come before him. An especially sturdy set belongs to Jane Jacobs, author of the 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In a book largely ignored when first published but now rapidly achieving classic status, Jacobs argued that healthy cities shared four characteristics. Their neighborhoods serve more than one function. They have small, short, walkable blocks.

They are made up of a variety of building types and facades. And, most of all, they are dense, rich experiences. Jacobs also believed that neighborhoods needed a civic Maypole-a place to check out a book or purchase license tags.

"Jacobs is probably one of the seminal characters in how we build what we build today," Schwarz says. "Jacobs analyzed what made neighborhoods work in the past and the proposition is that if it worked in the past, it will probably work in the future."

Like Jacobs, Schwarz is convinced that people want to congregate in pleasant, humanscaled environments. We used to have them. A hundred years ago, almost every Texas town had a square that formed the center of a large wheel of development that provided a mix of civic activity, business activity, retail activity, and leisure-time activity, drawing people together at a variety of times in a day. All of it contributed to what Schwarz calls the "casual fraternity" of a town.