Restoring Civitas – David M. Schwarz Architects & Downtown Fort Worth
January 27, 2009 at 9:30 am | General | Tags: Downtown, Sundance Square, urban design
Thought I’d share this video, which is a part of the excellent online exhibit For People and Places: The Work of David M. Schwarz Architects, created by the National Building Museum and the Institute for Classical Architecture and Classical America. This video, “Restoring Civitas,” talks about the revitalization of Downtown Fort Worth over the years, starting with the infamous “Gruen Plan” of the ’50s, and transitioning to the contextual, traditional urbanism renewal that Schwarz and his firm have been guiding since the ’80s. Included are archive footage of the Gruen Plan, interviews with Schwarz and his partners along with Ed Bass, discussions of revitalization techniques, and a bit about building Sundance West, built in 1988 as the first housing in Downtown since World War II and a real unknown in terms of success before its construction. For the curious, especially for those who aren’t from Fort Worth that might be joining us from Streetsblog and the Streetsblog Network, some of the other Schwarz projects shown in the video include the Fort Worth Central Library, the Maddox Muse Center, the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall, the Sid Richardson Museum, the Tarrant County Family Law Center, the Sundance East block, the Chase Bank Building, and the redevelopment of the former Sanger Brothers department store into the Sanger Lofts. The web site for Downtown Fort Worth, Inc. is dfwi.org, and the site for the Sundance Square district is sundancesquare.com.
There are many more videos, and lots of photos and text descriptions, online at the exhibit’s site, forpeopleandplaces.org. Any fan of traditional architecture and traditional urbanism ought to check out this exhibit of Schwarz’s work, which also has features on projects from Washington, D. C., the Yale campus, and others in addition to Downtown Fort Worth.