Landscape Architect Articles

LASN PMBR July 2010: Meet Me at Mustang Mall: Creating a Pedestrian Friendly Campus with Pavers and a Plan07-12-10 | News

Meet Me at Mustang Mall:
Creating a Pedestrian Friendly Campus with Pavers and a Plan

By Bruce H. Soileau, Consultant to Pavestone Company

The design challenge was to take a very long narrow space that was originally a street, and create something that had a series of areas along it that not only could function to house large crowds of people, but also function as a space that was comfortable to walk through. The constraint was that it had to fully function as a fire lane while maintaining a clear, unobstructed connection to the existing buildings, linking two points that were two blocks apart, and doing it in a way that didn?EUR??,,????'?????< Images courtesy of Pavestone

When students get together for events at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, they usually want to meet at a central location on the beautiful 230-acre campus. The new addition of Mustang Plaza and Mall is the perfect setting for such a rendezvous.

Mustang Plaza and Mall is a new pedestrian mall that links Moody Coliseum, Dedman Center for Lifetime Sports and Doak Walker Plaza. Moody Coliseum, a 7,457 fixed-seat basketball arena, and home of the Mustang basketball teams, was constructed in 1956. Moody Coliseum is also the site of SMU and numerous high school graduation ceremonies.

Doak Walker Plaza is on the south end of the newly constructed Mustang Mall, and proudly displays a life-sized action pose of Walker, SMU’s former Heisman Trophy winner and NFL Hall of Famer.

With all of these facilities in close proximity, Mustang Plaza and Mall will be a very high traffic area and a major thoroughfare for pedestrians in years to come, and will be the place to meet on the SMU campus.

This is a very large area, and originally all of the water drained down to the street, and then funneled down to curb drains. There were some issues with grades being too flat, especially in front of Moody Coliseum, so the grades had to be brought down to create a better slope away from the coliseum. All of the mall drainage runs south and is picked up intermittently into slot drains that run down the mall.

Master Planning

SMU’s Mustang Plaza and Mall is one of a series of projects that was envisioned starting with the creation of the Centennial Master Plan approximately ten years ago. It was a vision to create a more pedestrian oriented campus, designed for the safety and well being of the students. The long term vision was to create a center mall that unified and tied together not only the athletic facilities, but also provide a very important connection from the south part of the campus heading north, and then heading west over to the residential dorm areas.

In this particular project, what is now the center spine of the mall, had been at one time a public street. When the Ford Stadium was developed, the end of the street was closed and Doak Walker Plaza was created as a focal point; as a starting place for the future mall going north. But until the Mustang Plaza project was built, this was an active street with side street parking. The only thing that was any way pedestrian was a concrete plaza in front of Moody Coliseum and the two lawn areas on the side.

Visual interest along the mall is created with a variety of paver shapes, colors and patterning. For the Mustang Plaza and Mall project, SMU chose Pavestone City Stone?EUR??,,????'?????????????? III 12?EUR??,,????'?????<

The Challenges

The drainage and ADA issues were pretty tricky to deal with because SMU was trying to put an urban space in the middle of five permanent facilities. Chris Miller, Landscape Architect for the project, explained, “I think the other challenge on a campus is to create spaces that have a more garden-like atmosphere, but the challenge there is to do it in a way that is both physiologically safe and physically safe.

“Part of the challenge was to create an environment like this where there were no hidden spaces. You really have a clear view down the mall; you have a clear view on the spaces on the side. It’s well lit at night without being over lit. It has to function in the daytime, in the nighttime, and as a major use event with 1,000 people, or with two pedestrians walking up the center of the mall. It does all those things well.”

Architect Chris Miller, designed a garden-like atmosphere along the mall that is well lit and free of hiding places. Part of the goal in designing this long expansive mall was to try to break things up into a series of what felt like different spaces through the paver patterning and coloring, so the multi-colored bands of paver designs through the middle of the mall signify something else going on.

Pavers for Pedestrians

The Pavestone story is very important in all of the paver projects at SMU. Bob Schlegel, CEO of Pavestone Company, made a commitment to SMU more than ten years ago to donate materials for paver construction projects throughout the campus, so it has really been the partnership between Bob and Myrna Schlegel and SMU that enabled most of the projects to move forward. Joey Guedea, Architectural Sales Specialist for Pavestone, has been instrumental in maintaining a great working relationship with the Southern Methodist University staff as well as Chris Miller, the Landscape Architect for this beautiful project.

Jerome Meister, SMU’s Senior Project Manager, Office of Planning, Design and Construction said, “It’s a beautiful plaza, and we really appreciate the help from Pavestone and what they’ve provided us on this plaza. SMU takes great pride in the way our campus looks, and Pavestone has helped us in doing that.”

The area in front of Moody Coliseum has its own color palette and theme which intrudes on the long mall. There is a separate space in and around the mustang sculpture that is oriented not only as the focal point in both directions, but really the high point of the site, so it has some prominence. So when viewing from the south end of the site at Doak Walker Plaza and looking up the mall, not only is the mall slightly tilted, but the mustangs appear at a prominent position at the top, so that in itself is a separate space.