2021 Urban Design Award Winners

At the forefront of innovation, The AT&T Discovery District blurs the boundaries between corporate and lifestyle environments by transforming its global headquarters into an enticing urban campus inclusive to all. The District cleverly combines physical and digital environments with a matrix of fully connected digital platforms seamlessly integrated into the buildings and landscape. This immersive experience enables spur-of-the-moment take-overs of lighting, audio, and creative media content.

Throughout years of planning, the architecture and design team helped facilitate discussions between the client and city council, as well as neighboring hotels, businesses, and residences, to present the proposed media-rich space. After conducting numerous hearing sessions with the general public and city officials, the project acquired unanimous approval. Additionally, the design and implementation of the District is in line with the Downtown Dallas Inc. and the City of Dallas’ Downtown Dallas 360 Plan, which aims to advance urban mobility, build complete neighborhoods and promote great placemaking.

The Mayor Vera Calvin Plaza in Old Town (Plaza) has been touted as the City’s “front lawn.” In the early 1900s, Burleson was the home of an interurban rail station. The railroad in this location is long gone, but the station has been repurposed as the City’s heritage center and used as the overarching theme of the Plaza. This project was constructed in place of the existing City Hall parking lot. This project was timed to ensure that it did not start until two new parking projects were complete, and analysis was provided to show that there would be more parking spaces post-project than pre-project.

The Mayor Vera Calvin Plaza created a home for the rail cars and more context associated with them. This simultaneously honors the City’s heritage and modernizes the space by creating a unique gathering spot. The Plaza has something for all ages – ping pong and foosball tables, Adirondack chairs and benches, children’s activities, and a large lawn for playing or lounging. The City is ensuring that a balance is struck between programmed and unprogrammed times.

Railyard Park is a 1.2-acre multi-feature park and amphitheater located just steps away from Waxahachie’s prominent, well-preserved downtown. This new city park, which has stimulated downtown revitalization, is at the convergence of the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas (MKT) Railroad, the former Texas Electric Railway interurban passenger line from the heart of Dallas. This setting along the scenic Waxahachie Creek greenway draws people for its variety of activities, including symphonies, yoga and readings.

The resilient park has already served its dual purpose successfully by withstanding a torrential 7-inch rainstorm in April 2021 that caused Waxahachie Creek to rise well above its banks. All facilities withstood the flood, escaping damage with minimal cleanup. The park was up and running again for community events within a few days.

Park for Floral Farms is the collective vision of the Floral Farms residents to fight against environmental injustice on the former Shingle Mountains site. Through co-planned and co-led community engagement sessions with the neighbors, the design team listened to their vision. It helped them give physical form to their dream of turning this former toxic waste site into a beautiful community park. Soccer fields, walking trails, a community garden, trees, and a splash pad were high on the list for programmatic needs. Flower beds dot the site and mark the entry as a way of reclaiming their Floral Farms’ identity.

The success of this project is because the park was not something designed for Floral Farms; it was designed with Floral Farms. The robust and iterative community engagement process allowed the design team to bring Floral Farms’ vision to life. Identity, reflection, decompression, and discovery serve as the foundation for how this project will make an impact on the community of Floral Farms and the City of Dallas as a whole.

The “Urban Design and Development Scenarios for Arapaho Center Station TOD,” also known as the Arapaho Center TOD Plan, is the result of several years of planning and investment by the City of Richardson to reposition the DART Arapaho Center Station as the walkable, mixed-use front door to Richardson’s 1,200-acre Innovation Quarter. The Innovation Quarter (The IQ®), home to more than half of Richardson’s businesses and 20% of Richardson’s jobs, is the city’s latest redevelopment initiative identified in the City’s Comprehensive Plan.

 The Arapaho Center TOD Plan incorporates traditional best urban design practices while advancing new ideas and principles such as shared streets (woonerfs), mobility hubs, and detailed shared parking analysis. The Plan takes advantage of the progressive FBC, which eliminated minimum parking requirements for mixed-use developments, granted maximum residential and commercial densities, and removed maximum building height restrictions. The City worked in partnership with DART staff to ensure all transit facilities were adequately planned for as the station is redeveloped into a walkable, mixed-use development.

Union Nexus explores this historical but forgotten Union Station site in Dallas, TX, to be an accessible and self-sustainable food nexus. Addressing three major urban issues: food, water, and transit access, Union Nexus incorporates the principles of a Transit Oriented Development (TOD). A design strategy supports the revitalization of the existing infrastructures; surrounding empty parking lots and unused space will be reconfigured to form more compact, walkable, pedestrian-oriented mixed-use blocks. Additionally, as bike lanes abruptly end at Union Station, a pedestrian loop is to be proposed at 25’ above Reunion Boulevard, providing a healthy and educational experience, looping cyclists and strollers back into Downtown. While interior streets will remain open to the automobile, the street structure will be updated to give more priority to the pedestrian and bicycle.  

The project also incorporates urban agriculture, promoting a natural ecology. Water collection techniques are to begin in phases, restoring existing buildings into sustainable catalysts as well as multiple water filtration and permeation techniques in buildings and streets. Recycled water and collected solar, and wind energy will serve new program features such as housing, urban farming, dining and social entrepreneurship to help local jobs and education for sustainability.

The Southern Gateway Park is a transformative project in Dallas, creating a new park that spans I-35E in Southern Dallas. Dallas’ next deck park promises to bring hope and prosperity as it reconnects divided neighborhoods south of downtown Dallas, knitting together the fabric of our great city. The initial outreach efforts that would inform the park’s design started during the Covid-19 pandemic in the summer of 2022 and resulted in quarantine safety precautions. The challenge of conducting traditional public and stakeholder input sessions would have to be tackled in an entirely different way. The sessions would have to be conducted entirely virtually. The initial outreach effort had more than 140 people participate and received more than 220 written comments and questions. The virtual environment of the public meetings allowed more people to participate because they could do so from home and enabled people to feel more comfortable and free to ask questions. The resulting park programming and design are largely derived from the feedback gathered through the engagement process.

Concurrently, C-Suite Consulting led an innovative outreach plan, in collaboration with residents and other stakeholders, to identify, assess, and prioritize the existing needs and assets of the community. C-Suite Consulting examined ways that the park can positively and holistically impact the community in six key areas: Safe and Stable Neighborhoods, Economic Development, Diverse Housing Stock, Education Opportunities for Children & Adults, Health and Wellness, and Historical and Cultural Values. The final equitable development plan is structured to offer a summary of existing conditions. It suggests several ways to leverage the park investment to achieve equitable growth and equitably  benefit existing residents and those new and returning to the Oak Cliff community.

Following more than 20 years as a sub-consultant to Halff, Bud Melton continues his focus on active-transportation infrastructure, urban planning and urban design in Halff’s Planning and Landscape Architecture Division. As a lifelong advocate for active transportation, Bud spearheaded funding to convert the MKT rail right-of-way to what’s become one of the Dallas park department’s foremost civic spaces. Soon after, he reinvented himself as a bicycle and pedestrian planning specialist and joined his wife Annie’s transportation consulting firm, Bowman-Melton Associates.

In that role from 1995 to 2016, he managed scores of large-scale bikeway, trail and transit-oriented development (TOD) planning and design projects. He helped dozens of Texas cities plus several counties with concept development, master planning, funding partnerships and design assistance for varieties of micro-mobility infrastructure. He is an expert at finding innovative, creative solutions to complex problems and has achieved unprecedented success with stakeholder buy-in.  Bud was instrumental in shaping North Central Texas’ Regional Veloweb’ – an interconnected network of greenway trails and bikeways defined in the region’s long-range mobility plans. Teamed with Halff, he helped create the Dallas County Trail Plan: Trails for the 21st Century, a master plan which continues its implementation by Dallas County and its partner cities. They produced a similar plan for Collin County, which quantified connections between Dallas, Collin, Tarrant, and Denton Counties. During 2000-01, Bud helped the City of Dallas with its nationally acclaimed Renaissance Plan, which undertook comprehensive inventories of every park in the Dallas system.