Santiago Caltrava designed the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, which is all you need to hear to understand the Texas-sized ambition of the project. Evaluating the bridge's success, five years after its opening, is more complicated than that.
"It's been five years since the first cars rushed across the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge [in Dallas], but if you're hoping for a verdict on its success or failure, the only possible response is that the jury is still out," writes Mark Lamster.
According to Lamster, the design of the bridge has produced a split decision. Critiques of the bridge begin to emerge for its lack of pedestrian and bike infrastructure ("representative of that endemic Dallas tendency to privilege object over context," writes Lamster) and its lack of an aesthetic connection to West Dallas.
Finally, Lamster speculates that the most lasting story about the Hunt Hill Bridge's legacy is yet to be written:
Five years in, the bridge stands above all as a metaphor, a giant arched portal to another Dallas, one that the city has yet to realize. And the greatest unresolved question of all is not so much what will happen across the bridge, but what will happen under it with the unfulfilled landscape that lies between the Trinity levees.
FULL STORY: The great white hoop: Five years of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge
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City of Albany
UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research