![]() ![]() ![]() “We use the terms ‘iconic’ and ‘futuristic’ when describing Reunion Tower,” Reunion Tower President Dusti Groskreut told Dallas Business Journals in 2018, adding, “It can seem that those words have opposite sentiments. ![]() Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Carol M. The Reunion Tower set against the Dallas Skyline. Today, the tower stands as a testament to the strange and wonderful architecture of the 1970s. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Loadmaster.įlanked by a Y-shaped, black mirrored glass-wrapped 1,120-room Hyatt Regency Dallas hotel-also designed by Becket-and located on the edge of the city’s downtown by Interstate-35, the observation tower was crafted as a cultural attraction that could revitalize the city’s international image. The Tower of the Americas in San Antonio might be even taller still-750-feet-and is designed by O’Neil Ford, the only human ever to be designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Council of the Arts, but only Reunion Tower is known as a “Spanish-style exclamation point,” a reference to tower’s resemblance to the upside-down exclamation mark used in the language.Ĭlose-up view of the observation tower. While the Space Needle is 44-feet taller, for example, only the Reunion Tower can glow in a rich orange light during the Halloween season in order to resemble a giant, sky-high Jack-O-Lantern. Hartnell.īut none are as dynamic or evocative as Reunion Tower. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Kevin D. The Hyatt Regency Hotel shown beside the observation tower. The Dallas Business Journals reports that the tower was a relative latecomer in the revolving-observation tower arms race of the 1960s and 1970s, with Seattle (Space Needle, 1962), San Antonio (Tower of the Americas, 1968), and Los Angeles ( Bonaventure Hotel, 1976) all completing similar projects before Dallas. According to Dallas Skyscrapers, the uppermost, publically-accessible observation areas span three floors and include a lower “lookout” level that’s topped by the aforementioned revolving restaurant, and, at the apex of the tower, a revolving cocktail lounge. Like a New Year’s Eve ball that never drops, the orb lights up the Dallas sky every night, sometimes in a variety of festive colors, its 260 light bulbs flashing a series of computer-generated patterns to animate the skyline. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user texas_mustang. The restaurant, Five Sixty by Wolfgang Puck, according to its website, offers diners “floor-to-ceiling windows offering 360-degree views of the city from the dramatic, revolving dining room.” The tower rises to 561-feet in height and is topped in part by a panoramic restaurant designed to revolve around the building’s axis once every 55 minutes, creating one of the more remarkable-and still fully functional-high points of 1970s-era architecture. With a certain bulb-shaped observation tower in the news again, perhaps now is a good time to revisit another seminal observation tower project: The Welton Becket and Associates-designed Reunion Tower in Dallas, Texas.Ĭrafted as a three-story, lightbulb-studded geodesic dome hoisted atop a series of monolithic poured-in-place concrete piers, Reunion Tower is among one of the more iconic elements of Dallas’s eclectic and neon-lit skyline. ![]()
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