Ten Years Later, AIA-Dallas Plans on Updating Its Invaluable Guide to Dallas Architecture

Speaking of great books about Dallas architecture ...

On Monday, shortly after I mentioned that the Dallas Historical Society has reissuing Dallas Rediscovered on its to-do list, a Friend of Unfair Park sent word that the American Institute of Architects-Dallas is planning on updating The American Institute of Architects Guide to Dallas Architecture. After all, it's been precisely a decade since its original publication, and in that time the landscape of the city has changed considerably. Like Bruce Banner into The Hulk.

"We have begun talking about it," says Greg Brown, program director for the Dallas Center for Architecture. "When I started, it was one of the first things that came up: 'We need to republish it.' And so it's on our list of to-dos." Mind you, unlike Rediscovered Dallas -- or several other AIA-Dallas books, among them The Prairie's Yield: Forces Shaping Dallas Architecture From 1840 to 1962 and 1978's Dallasights -- the Guide to Dallas Architecture has never gone out of print.

"It's just that we've lost some of the buildings in there, and others have gone up, and it's time for an update," Brown says. "So we are forming some new committees at the beginning of the year, and one will be a program committee devoted to revisiting the guide. We'll get started on it in 2010. I don't know when the final product will be available." (Note to Greg Brown: Call Justin Terveen.)

Till then, this bonus: Over the weekend, I found in the stacks at Half-Price a copy of Dallasights. (Unlike some historic Dallas tomes, copies aren't expensive. At all.) And so, after the jump you'll find a few pages from the "Downtown Dallas" section -- including essays from Walter Dahlberg and Vincent Carrozza. Jump, but mind the dust.

Dallasights