PAST EXHIBITIONS

This is the first in a series of exhibitions at the Meadows Museum devoted to twentieth-century architecture in Dallas/Fort Worth and the larger region. Mark Lemmon (1889–1975) was the most important historicist architect of twentieth-century Dallas. He was unique in bringing a deep knowledge of European architectural history to all aspects of the city’s heritage. The exhibition focuses on two major issues: the architecture of public education and the extensive work done by Lemmon and his firm for the Dallas Independent School District as well as the Port Arthur School District between 1926 and 1962. The second issue will be “historicism,’ or the kind of modern architecture that takes architectural history as its source material and that roots modern buildings in the civic traditions of European urban architecture from Greco-Roman times through the eighteenth century.

Included with photographs of Lemmon’s houses, churches, and public buildings will be original drawings and plans.

The series proposes to investigate the major architects and issues from Dallas’s most important century. Future exhibitions will be devoted to the careers of O’Neil Ford in North Texas, Howard Meyer, and George Dahl.