A few days ago a friend taught me a Spanish idiom: vergüenza ajena. Think of it as an inversion of the German term Schadenfreude, that happy feeling of joy in someone else’s pain. The straight translation is “strange embarrassment” but what it really does convey is the feeling of humiliation to witness someone doing something stupid. In contrast to its German counterpart, it is not a pleasure.
After the initial shock, that feeling took over as I read about the proposed $ 10 million Las Vegas-style fountain that was planned to complement Klyde Warren Park. It is named after park officer Nancy Best and is paid for by Best and her husband Randy Best.
Introduced with a garish rendering and dubbed the “tallest interactive fountain in the world”, it would sit at the east end of the park and be able to spray jets of water nearly 30 meters into the air, the effects being enhanced by music and colored lights .
The announcement was described in the newspaper as “unlike anything the world has ever seen … destined to become a global icon of Dallas and a beacon for downtown”.
An editorial suggested it was “the Dallas thing in Dallas. Like big hair and 10 gallon Stetsons, it makes a statement. “
The prospect of such a dramatic change in a cherished public space requires more serious justification. Dallasites are no longer wearing 10 gallon hats – not that they ever did. This is a diverse, modern city desperately looking for more accessible open spaces, as the last year of the COVID-19 lockdown vividly demonstrated. There is no need for a kitschy gimmick that propagates a substitute vision of itself in the interests of Dallas’ self-promotion.
The same misguided thinking marks the $ 76 million expansion plan announced in December 2018 that would place a multi-story, income-generating pavilion at the west end of the park. Its main tenant: VisitDallas, the contested citizen booster.
These proposals fail because of the underestimation of the park’s own success. The best argument and promotion for Klyde Warren Park, and therefore Dallas, is the park itself: what it did to bring Dallas together physically and metaphorically. You don’t need excessive, artificial intervention to draw attention to yourself.
“I don’t understand the fascination of creating a seemingly foreign object in a park with elements that are supposed to attack the senses again and again,” says the well-respected landscape architect David Hocker from Dallas. “I prefer design that deserves awards such as subtle, sublime, meditative, or intimate, over the biggest, tallest, most ‘frills’ or loudest.”
His voice should be given special weight as he is responsible for designing the recently completed and widely acclaimed Eagle Family Plaza of the Dallas Museum of Art, which is adjacent to Klyde Warren.
Eagle Plaza at the Dallas Museum of Art was designed by landscape architect David Hocker. (Photo: Gregory Castillo)
Rejecting the current fountain proposal does not mean rejecting the idea that some kind of water feature is appropriate for the east end of the park. According to James Burnett, the landscape architect responsible for the design of the park, this was intended from the start, but was ruled out for reasons of cost. “We had always planned to mark the gate to Pearl Street on the east side with a kind of interactive water feature that announces and welcomes the people in the park.”
Burnett, winner of the prestigious 2020 National Design Award in landscape architecture, was not asked about the design of the fountain – an almost unfathomable oversight and missed opportunity.
The design was instead entrusted to Jim Garland by Los Angeles-based fountain specialists Fluidity Design Consultants. Predictably, the fountain designer designed a huge fountain with all sorts of functions.
Garland’s work includes restoring and enhancing the historic fountains at Longwood Gardens, about 30 miles from Philadelphia. But this lighted dancing fountain project is not an accurate precedent for Klyde Warren. The former is a legacy park on more than a thousand acres of land. Klyde Warren is a 5 acre city park built over a freeway.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/C34TTNQPCBFXVIX5PBQJ6UW7CQ.jpg)
A watercolor by Michael McCann shows the Nancy Best Fountain at night.(Courtesy Klyde Warren Park)
Indeed, the theatricality of the well proposed for Klyde Warren perched on the edge of the parking deck could also be a deadly distraction for drivers already making a dangerous entry into Woodall Rodgers Freeway.
The experience in the park is also unsettling, if not harmful. The idea that music – whatever its qualities – is a regular, if not constant, presence in the park is disturbingly invasive and a compromise for its status as a calming urban oasis. A water feature would be an attraction for the park, but only if it is adequately scaled and the game is in the foreground, which is now taken up as a comparative idea. In a time of climate crisis, his teachings should lie in the preciousness of water and not be wasted in an unsustainable flood of bourgeois hubris.
“Children don’t want a structure to look at or, worse, a structure that their parents ask them to pose in front of. They want a structure that they can climb, push and pull anywhere and adapt it to whatever game they want to play, ”says Alexandra Lange, author of The Design of Childhood and an expert on park and playground design.
“It’s better to spend money on something that gives more children more fun all day – or even for park maintenance that too many donors forget in favor of sparkling displays,” said Lange.
This is a particular problem with Klyde Warren. The main reason cited for building an income-generating pavilion in the park was the challenge of meeting its high annual maintenance budget. A well will increase these requirements.
Taxpayers who have promised “free” bullets often pay the bill this way. In fact, the city donated $ 10 million to support the pavilion project. If that had been paired with the $ 10 million pledged for the new well, the park’s maintenance might have been funded on a long-term basis. Unfortunately, it’s hard to put your name on maintenance.
And here my feeling of vergüenza ajena gets worse, a kind of deep sadness. Is it really necessary to say that the presentation of such flamboyant folly at a moment when food lines stretch for a mile is inappropriate, let alone the deafness? In May, the city put an incredible 235 employees on leave in the Ministry of Parks and Recreation, more than 25 percent of its full-time employees.
The rationale for continuing the well is that it is the product of a public-private partnership and the costs are not borne by the public partner – at least not initially. But that is a dubious reason. Public-private partnerships work when both sides of the equation contribute equally. This process was short-circuited here, with the private partner making decisions for the public partner and expecting unreserved gratitude in return. That makes it easy to dismiss critics as ungrateful ungratefuls. In reality, they just want to be treated as equal partners, at least in theory they are.
This is an endemic problem in a bourgeois austerity culture that is overly dependent on philanthropy. A city has a myriad of underfunded priorities; those who receive private funding are, of course, those more likely to serve the interests of the philanthropic class. And so the city could build a one-of-a-kind opera house – funded philanthropically – only to find out later that taxpayers have to come up with the bill for the upkeep. Sound familiar? It should, because the city pays millions annually to offset the cost of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, located next to Klyde Warren Park.
Meanwhile, the Routh Street Gateway project, which would provide a safer, improved passage under the Woodall Rodgers Freeway (which spans Klyde Warren), will not be fully funded for minority students at Booker T. Washington High School.
Ultimately, the disappointing thing about this proposal is what it says about Dallas. Klyde Warren Park was the project that told the city – and the world – they had learned from their past and sought a more sensible, sustainable urban future on a human scale.
We should keep what happens in Vegas in Vegas.
CORRECTION, Dec 11, 2020: This story has been updated to clarify that Nancy and Randy Best, not their foundation, are donating funds to the Nancy Best Fountain.
CORRECTION, Dec 12, 2020: This story was updated to reflect that Nancy and Randy Best did not view the Fluidity Design Consultants fountains for Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania as the model for the Company’s design of the Nancy Best Fountain in Dallas.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/UZFUKLOYRJBKDGGK4OB6NZDRX4.jpg)
See what else we’re building. You can find more architectural stories here.
[ad_1]
https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/architecture/2020/12/13/klyde-warren-parks-splashy-proposed-fountain-is-a-design-belly-flop/
