Introduction to Fort Worth Urban Design and Landscape Architecture

Flashcards covering the history of Fort Worth urban development, modernist landscape architecture, and specific planning projects like Panther Island.

Stockyards

A touristy area in Fort Worth that used to be an industrial area focused on the packing industry, which supplied meat and cattle to the region.

Victor Gruen

An architect who developed the idea of the shopping mall and designed a 1950s master plan for Fort Worth that emphasized pedestrian circulation.

White flight

The mid-twentieth century movement where people with power and money left the downtown core for the suburbs, leading to a shift in commerce and industry away from the city center.

Urban organism analogy

A concept used by Victor Gruen comparing the city to the human body, where the city center functions as the heart that must remain healthy for the entire organism to survive.

Anchor tenants

The large department stores, such as Sears or JCPenney, located at the ends of a shopping mall's pedestrian 'main street' to draw visitors.

Progressive Architecture Awards

Awards specifically designated for unbuilt projects that are still in the design or development process.

Jane Jacobs

The author of 'The Life and Death of American Cities' who advocated for small, walkable blocks to improve urban life.

200-foot block

An urban block size used in Downtown Fort Worth that is considered efficient and pleasant for pedestrian movement.

Golden rectangle

A rectangle based on the golden mean where, if a square is removed, the remaining shape is another smaller golden rectangle; it can grow to infinity in both directions.

Fibonacci sequence

A sequence of numbers ($1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21$) used in design where each subsequent number is the sum of the two preceding ones, typically growing in one direction.

Heritage Park Plaza

A modernist landscape park designed by Lawrence Halprin in the 1970s as a bicentennial park meant to reconnect Downtown Fort Worth to the river.

Water Gardens

A public space in South Downtown Fort Worth designed by architect Philip Johnson.

Sundance Square

A central urban hub in Fort Worth developed through a private-public partnership, which has sparked debates regarding the privatization of public streets like Main Street.

The Bottoms

The flood plain area next to the Trinity River where African Americans historically settled in the 1800s and early 1900s due to segregation.

Center for Transform 1012

A project to convert a former KKK headquarters building into a community cultural center.

Bypass channel

An engineered waterway intended to speed up the flow of river water past the city to mitigate flooding and allow for the removal of levees, as proposed in the Panther Island project.

Cut and fill

An architectural and engineering operation where soil is moved from one area (the cut) to create a new elevated landform or space (the fill).

White Settlement Road

A road in the North Side area whose name reflects a history of exclusion and frontier settlements intended to protect against Native Americans.

Cubism in landscape design

An exercise in abstraction involving the flattening of space and time, characterized by overlapping geometric fields and transparent layers of space.