City preview · DALLAS
Trees in Klyde Warren Park follow the gaps between beams spanning the traffic. Lights mark the joints of Reunion Tower’s spherical frame. Big Tex began as a giant Santa, though the figure at today’s fair is a replacement. RoboCop gave City Hall extra height with a painted image combined with filmed footage.
4 web previews 75 stories in the app
Above the freeway, on the tower and at the fair
Four complete stories and their public sources are shown here; the rest of the collection is in the app.
01 · Big Tex
Dallas bought a giant Santa and gave him cowboy clothes.
Big Tex began as a giant Santa Claus made for Kerens in 1949. Dallas bought the figure and had artist Jack Bridges remake him as a cowboy for the 1952 State Fair. A moving mouth was added later to deliver greetings. The old Big Tex burned in 2012; a newly made figure replaced him the following year.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
02 · Klyde Warren Park
Tree beds fit between the beams over moving traffic.
Klyde Warren Park sits above the Woodall Rodgers Freeway. More than three hundred concrete beams were laid across the traffic, with spaces between them used as tree beds. Lightweight foam and specially mixed soil reduced the load. The lawn looks like one broad, level surface, but the position of every tree depends on the beams beneath it.
Source: en.wikipedia.org Source: dallasparks.org
03 · Reunion Tower
The glowing ball is an open frame, not a wall.
An open aluminum sphere wraps around the three upper levels of Reunion Tower. A light sits at each of its 259 joints. Programmable LEDs installed in 2011 let those points change color like screen pixels, making holiday patterns and animations. From below by day, you can see through the framework. At night, the lights turn it into a glowing ball.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
04 · Dallas City Hall
A painted extension turned City Hall into a corporate tower.
The 1987 film RoboCop used Dallas City Hall as the headquarters of the fictional OCP corporation. The real building is much shorter. The filmmakers photographed a painted upper section and combined it with the location footage, extending the building upward by several floors. The lower part of that futuristic corporate headquarters is Dallas City Hall.
Source: gov.texas.gov
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