In the shadow of the Tarrant County Courthouse, another building is rising at the site of the beleaguered Tarrant County College downtown campus, now rechristened something like “Trinity River East Campus” to differentiate the Bing Thom structures from the former Radio Shack campus now occupied by TCC and dubbed the “Trinity River Campus.”  This new, small structure springs from the sunken plaza running under Belknap connecting to the two bluff-side buildings.

We’d write up some more words on how this design is cold, sterile, inhumane, and anti-urban, but we’ve all done that dance before.

Meanwhile, speaking of the two bluff-side buildings, crews are now knocking holes in the blank downtown-facing walls in what looks like the beginning of window installation, what we figure is some valiant but eventually ineffective attempt to make the buildings less dehumanizing and to create some small sense of street interaction.  Given some of the discussion of making the TCC buildings “better” by adding more windows, louvers, vines, and trees to the development, a classic quote from Frank Lloyd Wright comes to mind:

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

If you, the readers, will allow a bit of editorializing…

We would have hoped that the Downtown Design Review Board (DDRB) and other downtown stakeholders would have thrown up some serious objections to this design – everything from the blank walls to the sunken plaza to the utter lack of street interaction and more is diametrically opposed to what the DDRB is supposed to be encouraging in downtown Fort Worth: human-scaled, human-oriented urban design. It seems like the TCC campus would not have been allowed in its present form under an effective design standard.

Of course, given that other anti-urban developments such as the Radio Shack campus, the Pier One/Chesapeake Energy tower, and others get built downtown with no apparent problem (not a judgement of their architectural style – a judgement of the way they interact with the public realm, or rather don’t – Radio Shack and Pier One both have very poor urban design and little-to-no interaction with the public realm), we wonder sometimes if the DDRB and other people of power in downtown aren’t falling into the “any development is good development” trap. It happens across the Metroplex, in both Dallas and Fort Worth (our friends at Walkable D/FW have written about this attitude and how it has allowed some really unfortunate development in Uptown Dallas and elsewhere), and it can allow some really unhealthy stuff to get built and praised as “progress.”

Imagine for a moment if TCC had used its considerable assemblage of downtown blocks to build a more traditional (in form, not necessarily in style) urban campus comprised of sane buildings on standard city blocks, embracing and enhancing the walkable form of downtown Fort Worth instead of creating a blank-walled sunken repellant to walkability. Whatever style of building – modern, traditional, who cares at this point – if TCC’s campus had been built of buildings on normal blocks built right up to the sidewalk with friendly, engaging designs and, say, things like a bookstore, coffee shop, etc. on ground level on the sidewalk, we’d not only have a much more livable, walkable campus, but we’d wager it would have been done by now and for considerably less money (don’t forget that these structures are costing somewhere north of $1,200 per square foot, hugely more expensive than commercial construction in downtown).  Instead, we’ve got a development that will have a deadening effect on the street and walkability and which will (if the old renderings are still somewhat accurate) be surrounded by several blocks of surface parking lots (which aren’t going to be doing anything to help tie the Trinity Bluff developments into downtown proper).

Again, let us stress that this isn’t about style.  We still love new traditional architecture, but we’ve also seen plenty of modern design that is warm and welcoming (there’s just not much of it around the Metroplex).  TCC could have built a campus of traditional urban form with nearly any sort of architectural style and have it turn out more livable and engaging than this debacle, so before you assume we’re just wanting to take a piss over modern design and run home to David Schwarz, hear these words:  this is about urbanism, not architectural style.

One would hope that DDRB and other downtown stakeholders would learn to be more selective in what they approve for construction.  There was a lot of merit to bringing Tarrant County College to downtown Fort Worth, to add a student body to a walkable, livable area that is well-connected to transit and easily bikeable – this, however, wasn’t the way to do it.  As for us, we regret ever voicing support for this thing.  We were wrong then as we look with hindsight, and if we’d seen detailed renderings that accurately showed how the end product would turn out instead of vague models that promised some sort of earthy, warm, Frank Lloyd Wright-style development, we might never have said anything positive in the first place.  Fool us once, starchitects…