by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design an office tower and pedestrian-friendly mixed-use retail development that works within the context of a car-centered urbanism?

Summary: SOM’s Icon Tower and the mixed-use retail/commercial area to which it is attached seek to energize Dallas with a lifestyle district that is active 24 hours a day. Icon Tower, like its entire development, is defined by its relationship to the automobile. Its dynamic, fluid form is generated from the network of freeways and open space that surrounds it.

You might not be able to drive your car along the retail streetscapes of Dallas’s mixed-use mega-project by developer Icon Partners, but the architects at SOM who completed its master plan and designed its signature office tower and hotel formed it from a windshield’s-eye view. An ambitious pedestrian development in the heart of Texas car country, Midtown and its Icon Tower are a 3.7 million-square-foot, $1 billion meditation on the limits and benefits of the automobile during an age of skyrocketing fuel costs and changing consumer tastes.

Every city that never sleeps
A development oriented towards strolling, shopping pedestrians, Midtown also remains firmly attached to mainstays of automobile-driven suburban development. The 20-acre site, located at the crossroads of Interstate 635 and the LBJ Freeway (where it will be seen by “300,000 vehicles daily,” as a press release states), sits on the north side of the city, midway between its downtown core and its booming northern suburbs. The Galleria, an upscale shopping mall, sits next door. In this belt of suburbia, the Icon Tower will rise next to a handful of other mid-rise buildings with corporate Postmodern flourishes.

The entire development will offer 525,000 square feet of predominately high-end boutique shops, movie theaters, restaurants, entertainment venues, and a park. SOM helped to refine this master plan and is designing the office tower and hotel that anchors it. The goal is a ready-made urban shopping and entertainment experience—of the kind that Ross Wimer, AIA, a design partner at SOM’s Chicago office, has been creating is cities in Asia, including the Infinity Tower in Dubai and Shanghai Center in Shanghai. These cities, too, are working to define the role of the automobile in their emerging urbanisms. Next year, the world’s largest driverless mass transit rail line will open in Dubai. At Midtown, cars will be banned from the interior streets during the weekends.

“There is a worldwide trend for places that work 24 hours a day,” Wimer says. “If you live in New York, you take that for granted. It’s new to a place like Dallas.”

Movement and light
Height restrictions due to a nearby airfield limited Icon Tower to 34 stories, so SOM had to rely on dynamic forms to forge an iconic presence in the skyline. From a square footprint with rounded edges, the 715,000-square-foot office tower twists three degrees at each floor. Its clear-glass curtainwall façade belies its square structural core, where square columns follow the face of the buildings and curve out of plane. It’s a shimmering sculpture of graceful and delicate consumption. Wimer says the building will exhibit a sense of motion, as light refracts off its curves, and as its profile modulates for visitors driving around it. It’s a building informed by freeway speeds and the wide-open landscape of east Texas. “We wanted to make a piece of sculpture that was interesting to look at as you move around it,” he says. “I think it’s unique in this context, because a building of this scale is usually in a tight urban context, and you don’t get to see it from a distance or move past it fast in a car.”

Wimer also cites classical and anatomical allusions in the Icon Tower. Its sense of movement is spatial and kinesthetic. He compares the movement and form of the building to cloth draped on a classical Greek statute—delicate textures rendered in stone and marble that still faithfully betray the underlying form of the subject. “It’s almost like a torso because of the proportions,” Wimer says of the building. “You can still see the movement of the body under the cloth.”

This transparent relationship between outward appearances and internal structure is also how Modernist titan SOM has defined its practice since its inception.

Additionally, the tower is planned to be LEED® certified, though the final sustainability systems and practices have not been defined yet. The city approved the plan this spring, and no date for the groundbreaking has been set.

Contemporary authenticity?
North Dallas may not have the benefit of an authentic, urban shopping district that’s developed organically over time, like New York’s Fifth Avenue, Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, or Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown, so the architects at SOM have had to help create one. “The challenge is to create a place that feels authentic and not like an imitation of something else, and that really comes down to the quality of the architecture,” says Wimer.

Acknowledging the (sub)urban fabric of the area, whether out of fashion or not, is an honest attempt to make this project truly authentic to its site. If designing a building in a mixed-use open air pedestrian streetscape to be seen from the window of a car seems an awkward design challenge, just imagine the considerable cynicism you would need were you to attempt to plop all of SoHo down in a north Dallas freeway belt.