Mark Lamster: Dallas City Hall: Why the city’s most hated building might be its greatest masterpiece

You are wrong about City Hall. I write that presuming you hate it, because most Dallasites I know detest the iconic concrete leviathan. If you took a poll, I’m quite sure it would rank as the city’s least favorite building. To its many detractors, it is inhumane, overbearing, cold, depressing, anti-urban and just plain ugly. Let me disagree. Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, but let this rejoinder begin with the premise that no building better embodies what we might call “Dallas-ness” than City Hall. On the day of its inauguration, Erik Jonsson, the mayor who virtually willed it into being, called it “a monument to the city’s pride, a symbol of a first-class city that is reaching for greatness.” That sentiment was accurate when it opened in 1978, and it remains so today, more than four decades later. So let me propose a different set of adjectives to describe the late architect I.M. Pei’s maligned masterwork: forthright, brash, inventive, optimistic, futuristic and downright beautiful.

In Boston, which has its own “brutalist” City Hall, a group of advocates has suggested replacing that unfortunate designation with one that better reflects the scale and ambition that characterizes this school of design: Heroic. It’s certainly appropriate here. Dallas City Hall is, above all, a proclamation of civic bravado. It was born, at least in part, as a response to the shame and mortification that characterized Dallas in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. The old city hall, on Harwood Street, was irrevocably stained by that event. Two days after the murder of the president, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in a basement passage of that building, an insult loaded onto what was already a grievous civic injury. Jonsson was conscripted as mayor by the city’s business class (replacing Earle Cabell, who quit the job to run for Congress) because he was seen as the kind of forward-thinker who might pull Dallas out of its trauma-fueled malaise. He was a natural technocrat, a pragmatist with an optimistic sense of the future. As a child of Swedish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn, he was entranced by the early airplanes taking to the skies over the city. He studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York and in 1934 moved to Texas to work for Geophysical Services Inc., a firm providing seismic information to the oil industry.