It may only be a slight exaggeration to say that one of David Dillon’s career accomplishments was to put the words “Dallas” and “architecture” in the same sentence again. After a screed in 1980 entitled “Why Is Dallas Architecture So Bad?” launched his career as an architecture critic, Dillon took to the pages of the Dallas Morning News to praise, lament, explain, beg, scold, suggest, cajole, and influence how Dallas and its metropolitan region took shape throughout three revolutionary decades of development. To follow his career as a critic from the early 1980s, when downtown was dormant and street life an afterthought, to his retirement–when a new mindset for urban planning had largely set in, but still had far to go–is to listen to a larger story about how thinking about the built environment in North American cities has changed over the last generation, the new questions that have been raised, and the old ones that persist.
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