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Woke up this morning all prepared to direct your attention to Monday’s Transportation and Environment Committee briefing involving neighborhood farmers markets, in which the key city-staff recommendation reads, “Neighborhood Farmers Markets may operate 24 non-consecutive market days per year between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.” Seems … low, let’s say. Let’s revisit this Monday morning? Heading to the downtown farmers market this morning. I’ll ask around.
But, hey, speaking of downtown: Financial Times architecture critic Edwin Heathcote — who, with that name, let’s face it, was bound to become the Financial Times‘s architecture critic — visited our fair city and was struck by the fact that “Dallas contains, surprisingly, almost astonishingly in fact, one of the finest concentrations of modern architecture in the world.”
A few observations: The Winspear Opera House is all “corporate luxury”; the West End is full of “oddly deserted streets”; the downtown one-two punch of Philip Johnson’s Kennedy memorial and John Neely Bryan’s “cabin” make for “a strange, bleak kind of centre.” And he loathes I.M. Pei’s City Hall: “Looking like the back-end of a stadium combined with the ferociously forbidding aesthetic of Washington DC’s FBI Building, this is civic architecture that hates the idea of the city.”
