With AT&T’s $100 million Discovery District, Dallas gets a mini Times Square

The city that rolls up its sidewalks at five o’clock would rather be the city that never sleeps. At least a little, compared to the newly (if not officially) opened AT&T Discovery District, which brings a little taste of New York’s Times Square to downtown Dallas. In any case, it is progress.

The $ 100 million project is transforming the dying space around AT & T’s nondescript cluster of downtown buildings into a multi-block, landscaped pedestrian plaza, a true urban space in the heart of the city.

The “district”, actually more of a square, is located in the center of a pedestrian zone of the former Akard Street, which led from Commerce to Wood Streets. Its distinctive features include a 104 foot high video board or “media wall” that encircles the corner of one of the four buildings, all owned by AT&T, that face the plaza.

The unique corporate presence poses a philosophical riddle: is it a public space or a corporate campus? The answer is yes, that is, both at the same time. In this amalgamation, it could be the essential physical expression of the business-first ethos that defined Dallas from the start.

The newly constructed AT&T Discovery District is pictured from The French Room restaurant in downtown Dallas. The landscaping features of the course are the work of Dallas-based landscape architects Studio Outside. (Tom Fox / Employee Photographer)

Dallasites are used to mixing public spaces with private companies: For decades, the city’s most popular (and best-maintained) pedestrian mall was a mall: NorthPark Center.

“There is no other corporate headquarters in America that is like this. This is unprecedented, ”says Barry Hand, the site manager at Gensler Architects who oversaw the project.

That may be an exaggeration, but it is not entirely untrue. While other big tech titans – Apple, Facebook, Google – make dubious claims about digital “transparency”, they have built self-contained, highly secure suburban campuses in the three-dimensional world.

By reaffirming its commitment to downtown Dallas, AT&T has done the opposite. This decision is of tremendous benefit to the city, especially at a moment when the pandemic has made the future of the office (and downtown real estate) uncertain. While the company is not bringing back all of its 5,500 employees, its continued presence and investments bring renewed energy and a sense of economic stability to the city center.

The presence of AT&T is, as you’d expect, ubiquitous and at times worryingly overwhelming, although they want you to believe otherwise. On a recent visit, Hand described the website’s branding as “subtle”. At the time, we were standing in a 9-meter-high version of the company’s globe logo, rotating 180 degrees and glowing like a rainbow. I think all things are relative?

“The globe is a focal point, a celebration of our brand and our history,” said Erin Scarborough, AT & T’s senior vice president of planning and administration. But on the other hand: “It should be fungible in its interpretation. It’s not literal. “

Fungible or not, as a public sculpture it is as blatant as it gets, although it has inevitably become an Instagram magnet, which was certainly the plan: a stream of happy social media posts that polish up a company’s image, which is notorious for its poor customer service.

“Golden Boy,” the Spirit of Communication statue, is pictured on South Akard and Wood Street in the new AT&T Discovery District. The statue, originally called the Genius of Telegraphy, stood at AT & T’s headquarters in New York City decades ago. The historic Adolphus Hotel can be seen in the background. (Tom Fox / Employee Photographer)

The placement of the globe as a visual attraction at the front of the square on Commerce Street is particularly unfortunate as there was a better option: the 7-meter-high Spirit of Communication – better known as the “Golden Boy” – the magnificent sculpture made by Evelyn Beatrice 1916 Longman, who has been an icon of the company for more than a century and who most recently commanded the lobby of its Dallas headquarters.

What a dramatic appearance the winged hero would have made on the square with his lightning bolts in the air and his body wrapped in thick wire: the cable man as an Olympic deity. The architects had the brains to free it from the inside, but unfortunately it was relegated to the far end of the square, along Wood Street.

Structurally, Gensler did well by not doing too much. The most prominent architectural components of the design are two cantilevered two-story white steel grids that line the edges of the square and shade the spaces below while reinforcing the square’s north-south axis. This backbone is continued by the pretty paving slabs of rectangular gray stone that keep getting darker from Commerce towards Wood Streets.

Jackson Street has also been closed to traffic between Browder and Field (although it can be reopened to emergency vehicles). The Browder block between Commerce and Jackson was also pedestrianized, but treated as a minor matter.

The AT&T Discovery District is located near Commerce and S. Akard Streets in downtown Dallas and is within walking distance of Dealey Plaza, the Dallas Convention Center, Dallas City Hall, and Main Street Garden.

But the district’s focus is right on its central Akard Square. Here, cafes and restaurants line the west side, protected from the central ridge by a low fountain and a lawn that has to be replaced before the ceremonial unveiling. Some form of artificial turf seems to be in sight here, although a design made from more resilient native grass would have been better.

Steel trellises cover the outdoor dining area of ​​The Exchange Food Hall in the new AT&T Discovery District in downtown Dallas, Tuesday, April 20, 2021. (Tom Fox / Employee Photographer)

The opposite side of the square is dedicated to business. Visitors can enter the lobby of the company’s main Whitacre Tower – encased in sweeping high-definition video screens – and have access to a public gallery. (Images from the “Snyder Cut” of the superhero film Justice League are currently on view, courtesy of AT&T subsidiary Warner Bros.).

Outside, next to the fungible globe, there is a sunken “collaboration grove” with individual and communal tables. It’s an extremely comfortable place to sit, and there is free WiFi all over the place – using recycled wind energy – for those who want to work. Although not always pleasant. Too often pop music that is too loud is pumped onto the court by a powerful sound system. I’m not sure if the fault here came from a desire to add some form of acoustic branding or the misguided feeling that the space might feel less alive without it. In any case, it’s a downside.

The sound often, but not always, accompanies images on the Titanic video wall, which spans nearly 10 floors of the historic building on the southeast corner of Akard and Jackson. This building protrudes into the axis of the square and creates a viewing corridor so that the video board can be seen from the entire city center. This is the square’s Times Square moment, and it’s impressive, especially at night.

The 104-foot media wall encloses the corner of the building on Akard and Jackson Streets in the new AT&T Discovery District. The sharp 6K resolution covers the 9,300 square meter video board. Parts of the square have water features and are covered with steel trellises.(Tom Fox / Employee Photographer)

But it’s also awkward. The blackboard covers a window grid and gives the impression of office space behind the huge monitor. (According to AT&T, these rooms are used for mechanical gadgets.) Meanwhile, the almost entirely empty, windowless wall of Whitacre Tower, overlooking the plaza, is left alone. Architecturally, losing the view would have been a fair price to pay for a more coherent design.

Thinking about what could have been is a venerable Dallas tradition, and this place is as good as any other. Probably the greatest architectural delight here, and worth the trip alone, is the magnificent axial view of the Adolphus Hotel, grande dame of the Dallas skyline, and its distinguished neighbor, the Beaux-Arts Magnolia Hotel.

Close your eyes here and it’s easy to step back in time when a series of bars ran along the west side of Akard overlooking the lovely Baker Hotel, which was demolished to make way for the Whitacre Tower. In November 1960, the room that is now the “collaboration grove” was overrun by right-wing arsonist Bruce Alger and his “mink coat mob” of well-heeled North Dallas women to protest – in a vulgar way – Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson when Johnson was the Democratic nominee for Vice President.

On April 17, 2021, members of the Next Generation Action Network led a protest through the AT&T Discovery District to seek justice for Adam Toledo, Daunte Wright, and Marvin Scott III. (Juan Figueroa / Employee Photographer)

This spirit of protest lives on in this place today, albeit fortunately in a more peaceful form. On a recent visit, members of the Next Generation Action Network had taken to the square to urge AT&T to oppose restrictive voting laws in Texas.

This was a significant test of space and a potentially determinant one. Would security drive the group away or were they allowed to have a say? To what extent would freedom of expression be allowed in a supposedly public space?

The group stayed, and without incident.

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