Dallas Museum of Natural History, 1936

Mark Lemmon; C.H. Griesenbeck; John Danna
Needham-McCaffrey, renovation, 1988

South of the Midway, Dahl arranged the city's future cultural institutions informally around a peaceful lagoon.  The first of these was the Museum of Natural History, designed by Mark Lemmon and Clyde Griesenbeck as a monolithic, rectangular box, with little architectural detail.  The entrance is marked by three vertical window bays with decorative aluminum mullions, and is flanked by paired pilasters with shell-motif capitals.  The remainder of the building is conservatively clad in cream limestone.  In 1988, Needham-McCaffrey livened things up in their reclamation of the museum's basement for administrative and support space.  The northeast corner of the building was excavated and gingerly exposed via a delightful series of curvilinear, landscaped terraces designed by the Mesa Design Group.

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.