This Dallas architect led park design for Shingle Mountain site

Dallas architect and new mom Erin Peavey stepped into the New Year of 2019 preparing for what she feared was withering postpartum depression.

Just months earlier – after surprising doctors and living with breast cancer for a decade – Peavey’s own mother had died during her pregnancy.

Believing she had successfully pushed the tragedy to a very tall shelf, the young architect led a series of 24/7 user group meetings for a new operating tower at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth 36 hours after her mother’s death.

Then suddenly at home with a newborn baby, Peavey knew she had to cope with the heartache of being a mother without having her own mother to rely on.

All she knew how to do was take those overwhelming emotions outside and look for a place to heal.

“Every morning I would get up and take long walks with my baby,” Peavey recalls.

“I would find places that connect people and cross paths with other mothers and other children. And I wouldn’t feel so alone and isolated. “

Peavey saw a striking real-life example of the principles that had guided her architectural thinking since college: the importance of built spaces designed on the basis of connectivity, social health, and even healing.

That’s the same lens that delightfully nerdy architect who can’t make small talk brought with her to turn the infamous Shingle Mountain property into a new park for the Floral Farms neighborhood in southeast Oak Cliff.

“I realized the importance of these connections and I wanted that for everyone,” she told me. “This way we know that we are a community – by seeing each other all the time.”

This rendering, by HKS Pro Bono Department Citizen HKS, shows the planned entrance to the park that residents of the Floral Farms neighborhood would like to see on the former site of Shingle Mountain. The shape of the entrance signage and the words on the sidewalk in front of it – Together We Can Move Mountains – are part of a comprehensive park design that ensures that the ecological injustices that have happened on this site are not forgotten.(HKS)

Dallas-based architecture firm HKS has made a name for itself with billion dollar stadiums, huge health campuses, and swanky luxury hotels. Less glamorous, but more important, is the pro bono work that its architects are doing under the Citizen HKS brand – design work such as the plan presented on Thursday for the planned Floral Farms Park.

Talk about a community in need of healing. What happened at Floral Farms is a textbook example of social injustice, a case where a community’s zip code almost invites a man-made disaster.

Shingle Mountain is finally gone, thanks in large part to the unstoppable Marsha Jackson who fought for years against the hundreds of tons of shingles that were practically dumped in her back yard.

But this is a community that is still grappling with a number of raw deals resulting from unfair zone decisions.

Local residents who organized themselves as Neighbors United / Vecinos Unidos believe that creating a neighborhood park where Shingle Mountain once stood is an important step in transforming their community.

Peavey’s job as head of the HKS design team was to give physical form to the neighbors’ vision for a 6 hectare park.

“I’m a listener and a listener and a listener and a listener,” she told me. “It’s her voice that has to be at the table, not mine. At every step it has to be you, not me. “

Key to the effort were Jackson and neighborhood group co-chair Genaro Viniegra, Jennifer Rangel of the Inclusive Communities Project, and Evelyn Mayo, and Paul Quinn College’s Urban Research Initiative.

This HKS rendering shows the “ribbon of the game”, a yellow design element made of steel that runs through the park and connects the various activity areas.(HKS)

The 10-month design process included one community meeting after another with drawing boards and photos for individual feedback. Every step of the way was done in both English and Spanish and input was sought from both adults and children.

“This is a group of people whose voices have been stifled for a really long time, and to really be heard it takes a very special kind of listening,” said Peavey.

From three very different options – and many other discussions – a final draft emerged for the residents to evaluate.

“You could tell the community members were trying to be nice, but we were like, ‘Tell us what’s best, what do you like here and what don’t you?'” Peavey said.

The final park design approved by the residents includes space for play areas and paddling pools, sports fields and horse therapy, a community garden and food trucks, as well as a yellow steel “play belt” that runs through the room.

Most symbolic is the lush green hill that rises in a pocket of space. This “mountain” of reflection will ensure that Dallas never forgets the environmental injustices that allowed it in the midst of this neighborhood, but also celebrates the promise of this reclaimed land.

The entrance to the park reflects the same shape, and on the path that enters the room there are the words: “Together we can move mountains”.

Peavey sees the project as reclaiming space “into a place of community and healing – to have a hill from which you can feel like you are standing on this mountain”.

Now for the reality check: This park is far from groundbreaking. The big to-dos include zoning changes, land redevelopment and a lot of fundraising.

But the design work is a big step as there is now a solid design plan in place for where Neighbors United wants this location to go.

I know what Floral Farms wants for its future and now that I’ve got to know Peavey’s background and beliefs, this partnership increasingly feels to me more like grace than chance.

Peavey, who grew up in Austin and graduated from Texas A&M, describes herself as “the annoying kid who always fought for the little guy.”

She thought about social work first, but “I’m one giant piece of Velcro and I will take your emotions and make them mine,” she said with a laugh. “So my sweet mother, who was also very blunt, said: ‘Honey, please.'”

Instead, Peavey has done a different kind of social work through architecture and design research: the eyes of everyone at every table she attends – including city planners, investors, and architects – for the way the physical environment shapes emotional, mental, and social affects and physical well-being.

“That has to be in the lens that affects everything we do, and not seen as that extra cost that is too expensive,” she said.

Her mother’s illness also reinforced Peavey’s commitment to creating spaces that could relieve pain.

It was tough, Peavey admitted, being part of the HKS team that designed Parkland Hospital’s new Moody Center for Breast Health as her mother Katherine became more ill. “But it was also really nice and great because my mother was able to advise me from the perspective of a potential patient.”

The 36-year-old architect admits that explaining the design quality of everyday places to encourage social connections and deliver an anecdote about toxic loneliness is not easy.

For those of us who don’t swim in architectural waters, perhaps the best way to describe what Peavey strives for is a design that captures the essence of the inviting porch – the feature that she and her husband have in their East home Dallas has now sold Live.

That’s what she wants to bring to Floral Farms – a place full of life, beauty and authenticity.

“If I deserve this, they deserve it,” she said. “This park is vital as a reminder – and a symbol that Dallas is interested in.”

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