Dallas, Texas is one of the few cities that has a replica of its first building. Located in a park in the central business district, the small cabin that John Neely Bryan built on the banks of the Trinity River in 1840 founded a city and county that is now populated with more than 1.3 million people within a metropolitan area of nearly 4 million.

The replica of the cabin stands in Dallas County Plaza, which is adjacent to county office buildings, the downtown campus of the Dallas County Community College, near the renovated historic west end entertainment district and one block from the John F. Kennedy assassination site. Because of its location between these centers, the plaza attracts numerous office workers, tourists, people on county business and students from the nearby college. In its original design, however, the plaza was not expected to accommodate that many people and their diverse uses of the area.

A group of 10 landscape architecture students from the School of Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of Texas at Arlington volunteered their services to do a redesign of the park to show what it could become.

The existing cabin needed repair and renovation, and a terrazzo map showing the soils of Dallas County also was scheduled to be removed, repaired and replaced. As a part of those needed changes, the Dallas County Chief Executive, County Judge Lee Jackson, felt that the plaza should be redesigned to make it more of a “people place,” because the existing park contained only five benches and few other amenities.

The redesigned plaza featured a recessed area in the center of the park, hundreds of feet of seat wall, a water feature replicating the form of the Trinity River and a turf area for performances. It also mandated moving the Bryan Cabin closer to a major one-way street so that it could be backed up and framed by new vegetation. Another student, David Farr, utilized the psychological principles of Robert Sommers and William H. Whyte, Jr., by breaking the square plaza into smaller, more human-scale spaces. New benches, light fixtures, bollards and tree grates were selected or designed by students John Madziar and John McClendon to reflect the period of 1890 to 1920.

In order to produce the necessary plans, elevations and perspectives, student John Hunt used the UTA School of Architecture and Environmental Design’s Intergraph computer system. With the system, it was possible to produce perspective views from many different points and angles toshow how the anticipated park would look upon completion. One perspective was even shown from the top of a nearby 72-story skyscraper.

These rough computer drawings, plans and perspectives were rendered so that the design intent could be fully understood and evaluated by administrators, designers, and also the public who would use the park. In five weeks, the team of students produced 26 illustration boards and, under the direction of David Farr, built a fully lighted scale model of the project that showed how the plaza would look both during the day and at night.

Before the students began, there was no project or even any clear idea of what could be done. As a result of the students’ design, an additional suggestion was to include parking under the site. Now, after presenting the project to a number of groups and agencies, there is a real possibility that a professional firm will be awarded a contract to design a park that may be built at that location. It is the hope of the faculty at UT Arlington that such a firm would see fit to hire one or more of the students to execute staff work on this project as it progresses toward reality.

Bill Younger, one of the student designers, summed up the intent and feeling of the group by saying, “For a number of years, the citizens of Texas have helped us get a good education. We want to give something back by showing how our cities can become more pleasant, habitable and inviting.”