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Robert Meckfessel
DSGN Associates, Dallas
This architect’s journey into community
involvement began when my wife and I moved back to my hometown of
Dallas in 1992 after a four-year stay in New York. During my time
living and working in Manhattan, I had come to greatly appreciate
the joys - large and small - of a great urban center. The towers,
bridges, and cultural institutions of New York tend to draw the
most attention and the city is chock-full of wondrous examples. But
what I came to truly love were the small things - the tree-lined
side streets, sturdy brownstones, tiny mom-and-pop restaurants, and
the pocket parks scattered up and down the island. While the big
buildings and bridges get the glory, it was the smaller amenities
that lend New York an often-overlooked subtlety and charm.
In contrast, the years I had been away had been hard on Dallas as
the collapse of the financial, real estate, oil and gas, and
construction industries had taken its toll. Lovely old buildings
had been turned into parking lots for lack of tenants, downtown was
empty and desolate, and the streets and parks were showing their
age. The city had a gap-toothed, shabby air about it, and subtlety
and charm were in short supply.
Thus, when asked to chair the AIA Dallas Neighborhood and Housing
Committee by a very persuasive and persistent Executive Director, I
accepted. One of the committee’s first projects was
identification and mapping of the neighborhoods of Dallas, as a
joint venture with Preservation Dallas. Surprisingly, this
seemingly obvious task had never been done, and the resulting maps
become highly effective tools for developing neighborhood
organization and strategies. This initial effort led to a series of
leadership positions with a number of other organizations,
including the Presidency of Preservation Dallas, AIA Dallas, the
Dallas Architecture Forum, and the Trinity Commons Foundation, a
citizens group dedicated to realization of the Trinity River Plan,
a city-transforming urban design initiative. The common thread
among these disparate groups is that they are all concerned with
the quality of our city, its neighborhoods, parks, environment, and
livability.
At each of these organizations, I have had the opportunity and
pleasure to work with dedicated citizens of the widest possible
diversity of profession, ethnicity, income level, and viewpoints.
At times, consensus has been difficult to achieve on what to do
about a certain challenge, or how to do it, or who should do it.
But I have come to realize that those giving up their time to take
on these challenges are, for the most part, motivated by a true
concern for the quality of their city. While we may differ on many
things, all of these activists are united by a concern for the
places we will leave to our children and our grandchildren.
However, there are far too few such activists. Someone once said,
“90% of success is simply showing up.” The media
regularly reports shockingly low voter turnouts at elections. But
citizen involvement drops even further when one moves beyond the
voting booth and down to city hall, where the action really is. As
a result, a relatively small number of activists have great
influence over elected and appointed officials. This is both good
news and bad news situation; more involvement from the community is
certainly to be desired. However, it does mean that those of us who
do advocate our points-of-view can count on being heard.
The bottom line for me? I have met a incredibly diverse group of
dedicated, enthusiastic individuals along the way, many of whom
remain friends long after completion of whatever brought us
together in the first place. I have learned invaluable skills from
the best leaders of our community, useful not only in my advocacy
efforts, but also in my own architectural practice. And I have had
the pleasure of working with others to significantly affect
planning decisions and policies with which we disagreed.
Most importantly, though, Dallas is looking a lot better these
days, with an increasingly vibrant downtown, a visionary urban plan
for the Trinity River Corridor, and a variety of newly invigorated
neighborhoods. There is still far to go, but whatever effort it
takes will be worth it as we build the city that our children and
their children will inherit.
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