LINE

Background

Designing within a dense urban area poses unique challenges, and the pavilion within the city of Dallas’ downtown Pacific Plaza was no exception. The location is surrounded by tall buildings, requiring that the pavilion look appealing from a bird’s eye view as well as at pedestrian level. In addition, any construction had to avoid interfering with the sightline through the park, an important element when enticing passersby on all sides to enter.

The Design Solution.

HKS designed the Pavilion to connect with itself and its elliptical shape is appealing from a skyscraper window. The Pavilion itself sits approximately 15 feet above the ground and is supported by 11 columns. These cruciform columns are angled to appear as thin as possible, preserving the sightlines through the park.

Like many cities, Dallas is eager to re-create its downtown district to appeal to residents and workers. The Pavilion is part of an ongoing initiative to develop more parks in downtown Dallas and serves as a key element in the city’s “green link” of parks that will run through and connect several disparate Dallas neighborhoods.

Going a New Route

LINE investigated different concepts for the pavilion, settling on a saddle shape that hovers over the landscape, supported by 11 cruciform columns. Designers tapered the columns to maximize views of the park.

To make the design interactive, the HKS team played with perforations that would animate the pavilion by creating dynamic shade patterns throughout the day. LINE experimented with metallic skin perforations in the award-winning design of Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU and on the canopy shell of SoFi stadium. At the hospital, the enclosure of the parking deck was perforated to create the effect of sunlight filtering through foliage. The holes punched through the triangular panels that shape the roof of SoFi Stadium also form an image.

But with the Pacific Plaza pavilion, LINE went in another direction. HKS designers Jon Bailey and Tim Logan drew inspiration from Pacific Avenue, the namesake of the park. They learned about the street’s origins as a railroad route and found a map that detailed the stops along Texas & Pacific Railway, which operated from 1871 to 1976.

With this information, the LINE team worked through several iterations to convert American Morse Code — a series of dots, dashes and gaps — into a dot pattern that could be translated to the metal panels with a standard-size punch-die set. This bypassed the need for custom tools that would have increased the project cost. LINE partnered with Zahner, an engineering and fabrication company that is also working with HKS on SoFi Stadium.