Dallas Arts District

The outdoor performance space between the Winspear and Wyly — free programming year-round and the most accessible entry point into the Arts District for anyone who isn't sure they belong here.

Built in 1900 by Dallas Morning News founder A.H. Belo — the oldest surviving mansion in Dallas.

The public magnet school two blocks from the Nasher that produced Erykah Badu, Norah Jones, Roy Hargrove, and Edie Brickell — one of the most remarkable public schools in the United States.

The oldest Catholic church in Dallas, founded in 1902 — the spiritual anchor of the Mexican-American community that built much of this city.

Trammell Crow spent decades building one of the great Asian art collections in the American Southwest — then gave it to Dallas for free.

Over a century of collecting, a 1984 Edward Larrabee Barnes building, and free general admission — the civic argument that art belongs to everyone.

The pedestrian corridor designed to hold the Arts District together — and the argument that Dallas could have a walkable cultural street if it built one deliberately.

How Dallas deliberately built the nation's largest urban arts district — Pei, Piano, Foster, and Koolhaas along Flora Street, over forty years of civic will.

A 5.2-acre park built over the Woodall Rodgers Freeway in 2012 — the deck park that reconnected the Arts District to downtown and became the social center of this part of Dallas.

I. M. Pei's symphony hall, tuned like an instrument by acoustician Russell Johnson — the Lay Family Organ, the Perot gift that named it for a partner, and the building that proved the Arts District could be magnificent.

The 42-story residential tower that reflects concentrated sunlight into the Nasher Sculpture Center — and the architectural, legal, and civic fight that followed.

Renzo Piano's 2003 garden pavilion housing one of the world's great private sculpture collections — and ground zero for one of Dallas's most contentious architectural disputes.

The first residential building in the Dallas Arts District — the bet that people would actually choose to live here, and what it means when they do.

The 1984 office tower with a public sculpture garden — the man who built it also gave Dallas the Crow Museum of Asian Art, and his story runs through the fabric of the district.

Norman Foster's 2009 opera house — the red parasol canopy is climate engineering for Dallas summers, not decoration.

Rem Koolhaas and REX's 2009 theater building — every surface moves, every configuration is possible, and the building is intentionally impossible to understand from the outside.