PROTO-ARCHITECTURE

Firewheel is an urban Town Center multifamily project located in Garland Texas. The Firewheel Town Center opened in 2005 and is located at the intersection of Bush Turnpike and State Highway 78. While it’s a bit dripping in historicism for my taste, it has pretty rigidly followed recent trends of ‘traditional’ urban town center place making. One could easily argue that, in many ways, it is just a traditional mall, sans roof, with a ring of parking around the perimeter and no viable connections to the surrounding neighborhoods. And I’d agree with them.  However, there is a modest amount of small scale office space, and coupled with the incorporation of residential product, the plan provides a nice start at economic diversity and mixed uses.

There are times when you design to blend in with the existing and times when you design to contrast, and this an example of a direction that carries on the morphology of what had already been established.  I’m hoping it delivers a nice level of walkable urban living in a traditionally suburban regions, and attempts to augment and help balance this already heavily retail-centric development.

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