Old Parkland: Community, Architecture and the American Ideal

Old Parkland is a rare if not unique place: an office ‘campus’ in Dallas, Texas, designed to inspire workers through the art and ideas that infuse it.  Developed from a former hospital built in 1913, it now comprises nine blocks in a Jeffersonian style.  The green landscape setting is adorned with numerous works of sculpture, as well as inscriptions from philosophy and political science.  Tenants form a community of like-minded individuals, whose intellectual life is enriched by a stellar programme of debates and other events.

Dedicated to the values on which America was founded, Old Parkland  was completed in 2021 by the building of a belltower, whose theme is  Opportunity – the chance  given to everyone in a free society to make their lives better.  Elsewhere, Altruism – the selfless love of other people – is celebrated as an ideal to which people who prosper under the free market should aspire.  The utopian environment, comparable with the ideal cities of the Italian Renaissance, is highly popular with those working in it, and could form a model for other developments across the Western world.