Mark Lamster on what Dallas can teach us about the American City

When Mark Lamster (episode 41) was on the show, back in 2017, he was finishing up what would become The Man in The Glass House, his biography of architect Philip Johnson. The intervening nine years have been big for him: he’s continued to serve as the architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, for which whe recently received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, in part for his writing in its pages advocating for the preservation of the controversial Dallas City Hall.

This is a long-winded way of say there is perhaps no one else who has thought as deeply about the architecture of Dallas as Lamster. This thinking informs his new book, out next month, called Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas as Told Through its Architecture. The books gives its readers a tour of the city’s buildings, helping us understand not just why Dallas is the way it is. but also presenting a history of how American cities have become what they are. I caught up with Mark to talk about the new book, what we can learn from Dallas, and how he’s thinking about architecture criticism today.

You have a new book coming out next month, Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas As Told through its Architecture and you’ve been the architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News since 2013 so I’m ashamed to admit this to you but I haven’t been to Dallas since I was seven years old. For someone like me, tell me what makes Dallas interesting to you and what makes its architecture, perhaps, especially interesting?

I like to say that living in Dallas is like going to the circus every day, a place that is endlessly entertaining, where the sublime and the ridiculous are in a constant two-fisted battle. I use the term Dallas Logic to describe the city’s paradoxical phenomenon. Here is a city, for example, that bought a building to house its building code compliance department, only to find that it failed building code, and had to be sold at a massive loss. Yes, this actually happened.

VIsitors (and locals) often describe Dallas as ugly and conformist — and it is — but it also has these wonderful pockets of beauty and weirdness and gentility. Fair Park, for example, is a national treasure, the largest collection of intact art deco buildings in the country, a civic jewel that, typically, the city can’t seem to properly manage.

You write in the introduction that yes, Dallas is weird. Yes, it’s a paradox, but it’s also representative of the broader trajectory of the American City. Tell me more about this history and what we might learn about cities, more generally, by studying Dallas.