Highland Park Village Recognized with Landmark Award

The original prototype is the one all successors aspire to emulate, its best qualities serving as a north star for those that follow. It’s an old idea, our daily environments structured as they are by iterations of once-novel concepts we now accept as quotidian. When was the last time you drove past a shopping center and slowed down, even stopped, to take in its beauty? When was the last time one caught your eye at all? 

In 1928, Dallas architects Marion Fooshee and James Cheek set out to design a retail complex that not only catches your eye but invites you in. Three years later, the first shopping center in the United States specifically designed to accommodate automobiles was constructed: Highland Park Village. We can safely say Fooshee and Cheek’s example has bred countless successors, and none have quite yet lived up to the original.

For both the working architect and the complete layperson, Highland Park Village’s gravity is impossible to ignore. Its centrality was obvious to me as I grew up in Dallas, well before I understood anything about urban design. I don’t mean “centrality” in terms of its spatial location within Dallas or the town of Highland Park, but in reference to its character and purpose. Communal economic activity has always been the primary organizing factor behind town squares and main streets, but what Fooshee and Cheek’s concept accomplished—not to mention OMNIPLAN, HP Village Partners, and the legions of other architects, owners, and laborers who have kept Highland Park Village alive and evolving—was particularly American. Dare I say, particularly Texan.

Fooshee and Cheek sought aesthetic inspiration from the urban atmospheres of Barcelona and Seville, as well as closer to home in Mexico and Southern California, remixing centuries of Iberian decorative and design philosophies into a living Spanish hamlet. From the Spanish colonial perspective, Texas was terra nullius, and economic interests were their unambiguous priority. Soon after, as Spanish intentions developed from a purely extractive model to one more based in long-term settlement and Hispanicization—mirroring the same development in their colonization of what is now Mexico—residential communities were continuously established. Direct Spanish determination over Texan culture was short-lived, as Mexico achieved independent nationhood and Texas shifted from colonial subdivision to Mexican state. 

The past never being dead (or even past), a site’s history is always an active element throughout the design process, whether as intentional consideration or subliminal influence. Without making overt reference to a singular locale, Highland Park Village’s Spanish texture is felt more in the aggregate than the specific. Floral motifs and the tilework they ornament span across Spain and Mexico, both temporally and geographically; balconies are open or roofed, wooden or wrought-iron, with simple parallel balusters or intricate criss-crossing displays of fine woodworking; Moorish horseshoe arches frame one storefront’s windows while pointed arches lend its neighbor’s a more gothic tone. These disparate features coalesce to create the gestalt sensation of spending a dry summer afternoon in a Spanish-Mexican plaza—from nowhere in particular—but with Fendi handbags just a short walk away.

Imitation and inspiration drawn from ages past is nothing revolutionary in and of itself. For all its novelty, Highland Park Village also clearly partakes in that ancient tradition of cultural and historical reference. Its mix-and-match Hispanic flavor could not have originated wholly organically. Even if  Fooshee  and  Cheek’s  choice  of  referenced culture—Spanish-Mexican—was guided entirely by a subconscious awareness of history and environment, they could not have stumbled upon the exact same formal markers of that culture by accident. It was, after all, chosen. 

That balance of function and aesthetics, however, is something of an outlier: the remainder of Highland Park Village’s visual signifiers exist to evoke a desired feeling rather than serve a practical purpose. The red baked clay roof tiles so emblematic of Spanish Mediterranean and Colonial architecture, for example, are notoriously expensive, fragile, and difficult to install, and also require a more robust structure to address their collective load. Their outsized effect upon the Village’s tenor, however, outweighs any claims of inefficiency. Modern concerns might tempt a designer to diminish or discard them, but doing so would compromise the experience.

The result is a remarkable continuity of atmosphere. As you stroll the Village, you are subtly aware that the plate glass storefronts do not structurally depend on their semicircular arches. Fooshee and Cheek couldn’t even have foreseen the advent of the technology required to produce them! Even so, the feeling is seamless. A casual shopping walk becomes, somehow, a stroll backward through time. This effect, also present in so many other recreations and replications of urban antiquity, is not the Village’s true innovation—but it is undeniably powerful.

Highland Park Village was conceived just eight years into the age of the automobile. The 1920s marked America’s entrance into a car-centric collective consciousness, especially in the increasingly populated West. Those open spaces had been pierced, but not dominated, by locomotives. Trains are not the vehicle of the individual, however, and they could facilitate individual retail consumption only insofar as passengers could purchase small items from vendors onboard. Even trams and railcars ferried large groups along designated paths. Horses could transport only a person or two, and horse-drawn carriages were either publicly available taxis or prohibitively costly for the increasingly relevant American middle class to own and maintain. 

Here, a new space in the market was ready to be filled: new cities, new models of consumption, and a new demographic ready to consume. Automobiles moved with a fluidity only natural in hindsight—leaping from the farms they were first designed for into bustling city streets, allowing a man and a select few family members to take a quick drive down to the shopping hubs of main street without having to live nearby. Models catering to both the working and upper classes were rapidly developed, and planners integrated cars as a fact of city living with equal rapidity. This was the milieu that Highland Park Village capitalized upon. 

Fooshee and Cheek did not rush to accommodate cars after their ubiquity became clear, squeezing them in where they could. Nor did they focus solely on automobiles at the expense of pedestrians; the Village was conceived—and remains—a luxury designed for walking. Plazas are essentially flat, open spaces bordered by interior-facing facades. Cars, too, perform best on flat, open spaces… two and two equal four, so to speak.

Then as now, small groups or individuals drive to Highland Park Village and park under its plentiful oaks, each adorned with fairy lights like so many fireflies. They walk past the boutiques and high-end restaurants, with a not insignificant amount of attention drawn to the timeless monument of the Village Theatre and its authentically restored marquee. A quick bite or drink at the café is followed by an ascent up delicate, shallow terracotta steps into the intimate corridors that weave behind the storefronts, where, for a moment, you might genuinely believe you’ve slipped into some old Spanish passageway an ocean away. 

This is the source of the Village’s rare excellence which all can feel but few can put their finger on: the tailor-made navigation from the sphere of transit, to the sphere of the open public, to that of the individual—all suffused with a purposeful yet nonspecific ambiance of accessible luxury. A subject of history and the originator of a new tradition, from worlds away and times long gone yet only a short drive from home, Highland Park Village has endured, ever imitable and ever Texan.