CITY HALL TOWER

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A plan to save Dallas City Hall by building a mixed-use tower to pay for it.

The Goal

The goal of is to preserve City Hall with a project that reinvigorates downtown Dallas. By developing the portion of the plaza at city hall that is underutilized and dangerous we can provide funds for the redevelopment and rehabilitation of city hall. This creates value for the city by preserving our heritage while still accommodating business interests key to our economic success. 

Finding Humanity in the Machine

The proposed tower is rooted in Art Minimalist Architecture, the design philosophy that defines Allerior's work. The approach fuses utilitarian structure with art to produce warm, balanced minimalism. Morrison drew on the 1987 film RoboCop, which used Dallas City Hall as the backdrop for its fictional dystopian corporation and which he reads as a story about finding humanity within the machine. That tension between machine and human, brutalism and warmth, runs through every dimension of the proposed design.

A Tower of Two Faces

The building is conceived with two distinct identities. The south facade, facing City Hall, mirrors the raw brutalist concrete of the Pei building, representing the machine. The north facade, greeting residents and workers arriving from uptown, is clad in enamel-painted concrete and living moss, representing the human and the natural. At the building's summit, the two facades meet and twist, symbolizing the machine becoming the human in the sky.

A defining architectural feature is the God Telescope, a 44-foot tall by 47-foot wide portal carved through the tower at the 34-degree angle of City Hall's own facade. The aperture is precisely aligned so that visitors standing at a designated point on the City Hall plaza can look directly through the building into the open sky above. The telescope will be free and open at all hours, accompanied by a ground-level gathering area fitted with rows of concrete benches arranged like church pews.

Program: City to Sky

The building's program spans the full spectrum of urban life. At grade, a landscaped retail podium will feature a nightclub and active street-level uses. An anchor grocery store on the third floor, fronted by a giant food mural visible through the glass facade from the street, will serve downtown residents. An open-air concrete-louvered parking structure sits above the retail base, followed by commercial office floors and a residential tower comprising approximately 50 floors of modular apartments.

The apartments are designed to be built as factory-assembled volumetric modules that are trucked to site and craned into a cast-in-place concrete structural frame without conventional floor plates. The system is designed to allow five floors of residential to be assembled per week, or approximately twenty floors per month.

The building's crown is reserved for its most spectacular amenities. Floors 100 and 101 feature an outdoor pool deck with a cantilevered pool, a 30-foot RoboCop helmet grotto, and a ten-story mural of RoboCop on horseback. Floors 102 through 104 house a 50,000-square-foot fitness facility designed to rival Cowboys Fit. Floor 105 is an observatory themed around Dallas in the year 2100, complete with a robot bartender bar and panoramic views extending to Fort Worth. Floors 106 through 114 are a series of four-story sky townhouses forming a billionaire's village, each with generous outdoor terraces.

Reclaiming the Plaza and Dallas Civic Life

Allerior's proposal also includes a comprehensive redesign of the City Hall plaza. Currently vast and largely uninhabitable in the Texas heat, the plaza would be transformed through strategic landscaping with trees and grass, creating a shaded park-like environment scaled to the demonstrations and civic gatherings Dallas realistically hosts. Morrison believes accessible, shaded public space will meaningfully increase civic participation, particularly during summer months when residents are free from work and school.