It is hard not to wonder about the lessons the Highland Park Independent School District, not to mention some Highland Park residents, are imparting to their children — and never mind protesting books like David Shipler’s The Working Poor.
Today, the district released the renderings for a series of new elementary buildings it hopes to build, in the process demolishing three historic school buildings — Bradfield, University Park and Hyer elementary schools.
These are works of considerable architectural distinction and were included on Preservation Dallas’s recently released “most endangered” list. The Bradford (1925) and University Park (1928) schools were designed in handsome Spanish style by the revered Dallas firm Lang and Witchell, whose work includes the Magnolia Building (now hotel) and the Harris County Courthouse in Houston. Hyer Elementary is the work of Mark Lemmon, whose Tower Petroleum Building on Elm Street, might just be the apogee of commercial architecture in Dallas.
To add insult to the proposed indignity of their destruction, the new schools, designed by the firm Stantec, will be dressed up in faux historic detailing. This is no way to teach the next generation. A new building, and especially an educational building, should be honest about its method of construction and expressive of contemporary technologies and ideas.
More to the point, the fantasy that Highland Park exists in some ahistorical bubble is just that — a fantasy. It’s time to stop pretending 2015 is 1954.
For an example of how the new might be successfully married to the historic, HPISD supervisors might venture to the Arts District for a tour of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the Dallas magnet school for the visual and performing arts. Here, a handsome 1933 building by Lang and Witchell was expanded in 2008 by the architect Brad Cloepfil in a sharp modern language that is both complementary and distinctive.
In its report, Preservation Dallas noted that “a blend of old and new buildings would celebrate the importance of physical examples of civic history when educating young, elementary-aged children.”
They deserve nothing less.
Mark Lamster/The Dallas Morning News
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