HKS, DALLAS - PACIFIC PLAZA PARK PAVILION

We're currently working on a project behind our Dallas headquarters called Pacific Plaza Park Pavilion. The construction will begin on that in a week and that is the project that we will be presenting to you today.

Currently, they're separated by a street called Live Oak Street, which is gonna be vacated to allow this park to be incorporated into the overall Pacific Plaza Park design, and right now, we're actually looking to protect a lot of the existing live oak trees. You can see many of the trees around here are flagged right now. These are gonna be trees that are incorporated into the final park design.

This street actually connects Pacific Plaza to several other parks within downtown, starting to the north with Klyde Warren Park, which is actually one of our newest deck parks that was build over the interstate. And so Harwood connects all the way from Klyde Warren Park all the way south to the farmers' market. It also runs into Main Street Garden.

Many people travel from the Saint Paul DART stop to the bus station and so it's very connected to public transportation options other than just vehicular transportation.

Working with the client, they felt like, and the rest of the design team felt like that whenever you looked through the pavilion they still wanted to see a fair amount of park and so this design actually came down onto two abutments on either side and so, while it was very, had a lot of visual connectivity through the pavilion, in certain perspectives it did seem a little bit closed off and so we were asked to look at different ways that we could design the pavilion to touch the ground so that there was more visibility through to the park beyond. So this is where we got the idea of really taking a few touch points, working with a structural engineer, coming up with a few touch points that we could then very fluidly sort of bend down to the ground and create five abutment conditions. From these columns come the secondary structure and there were large 20 inch tubes which started to connect each of the concrete abutments.

So we've actually insulated for next week to begin demolition work because at that point all of the meter, meters that surround that site have had to been removed, as well as any telecommunication lines when power poles exists around the site.

And so we had done several shadow analyses with the context of the existing buildings surrounding the site to understand how the sun traveled across the site throughout the day to see what sort of shadows were produced by the existing buildings around the site, as well as how those shadows would be constructed on the ground once the pavilion was in place.

And so these are all studies that we've started to look at, and investigate how each letter in the alphabet translated from the Morse Code into punch pattern. We did several other studies looking at how this may translate into a larger chuck of text. So no longer looking at single characters.

Those were then driving the structural system and so we were able to rationalize those ellipses into a series of three point arcs that the fabricator could then, very easily, bend into place and so, the steel columns and beams hold up the aluminum tubes, which make their way around the pavilion. From there, this is where the skin fabricators scope of work comes in. So they will actually, once the columns and the aluminum tubes are all set up on site, the panel fabricator will come in, they have a series of aluminum fins that they've constructed.

One of the unique things about the ellipse is while its not a sort of linear gesture throughout the park that meanders, it has a continuity to it but it still does allow for bits and pieces of the pavilion to touch each of these outdoor rooms, and so while your in Asten Grove, while you're in the lawn, while you're coming up the arrival stair, you're in the knoll, you will actually have a sense of the pavilion and be able to interact with it at various stages throughout the park.

This is actually a typical GMP contract so the client that we're working with is Parks for Downtown Dallas. They're actually a non-profit entity who are funding several parks within downtown Dallas through private donations. Pacific Plaza is the first of those four parks.