Dillon Center for Texas Architecture

The David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture was founded in 2011 as a way to connect the School of Architecture to the public conversation about architecture and urbanism in north Texas. The Center sponsors student and faculty research projects and organizes public events that bring together architects, historians, planners, policy-makers, and everyday citizens to examine issues of critical importance to Dallas-Fort Worth.

David Dillon was the award-winning architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News between 1981 and 2006 and after his untimely death in 2010, his wife Sally donated his papers to Special Collections at UT Arlington. The Center honors David’s tradition of insightful writing about architecture and civic culture and his role as an advocate for better design in everyday life.

The Center is funded primarily through philanthropic support. You can join in supporting our work by visiting our Donate page.

News from the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture

Historic Black communities in Texas face steep challenges. UT Arlington wants to help.

Historic Black communities in Texas face steep challenges. UT Arlington wants to help.

A historical marker in a Fort Worth park is all that’s left of the original schoolhouse that once stood as a center of community life in Mosier Valley, a freedmen’s town established by formerly enslaved people shortly after the Civil War. Built in 1924, the structure was bought and moved decades ago and now operates as a beauty salon in Bedford. But the legacy of the all-Black community near Euless, among the first of its kind in Texas, continues to live on through its descendants and the families who call the far east Fort Worth neighborhood home. Those living memories, and the current challenges faced by Mosier Valley residents, were what drew a bus tour of University of Texas at Arlington students and faculty to the park on Wednesday.