Fair Park Music Hall (General Motors Building), 1925

Lang and Witchell
Peterman and Peterman, renovation, 1936
Jarvis Putty Jarvis, renovation and addition, 1972

In 1925, the City of Dallas finished construction of this cavernous 3,500 seat music hall located to the south of the Parry Avenue entrance.  The building designed by Lang and Witchell was the winning entry in a limited design competition sponsored the previous year.  Their design incorporated Spanish Colonial Revival detailing, primarily in the dominant square towers on the building's north side and in the paired octagonal towers on the east and west facades.  For the Centennial, the Music Hall was the only existing building not extensively altered; its conversion to display General Motors automobiles required interior modifications only.  In 1972, the building was sensitively expanded by Jarvis Putty Jarvis, who utilized the octagonal shapes of the original building as a plan-generating device for the new additions.

Credits: Excerpts taken from The American Institute of Architects Guide to Dallas Architecture, published in 1999 by the American Institute of Architects, Dallas Chapter. The editor of this book was Larry Paul Fuller. The Fair Park Introduction and entries were written by Willis Winters, AIA.

Permission to publish these excerpts was granted by The American Institute of Architects, Dallas Chapter, in October 2002.