Would Have Been Wednesday – North Texas Tollway Authority

Our weekly Wednesday journey through the Epstein archives of what Would Have Been takes us back to Dallas, 2002, for our design of a prototype Toll Plaza for the North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA). Our design concept, which was a runner-up finalist to event winner Murphy/Jahn, strove to create an innovative and poetic solution to what is commonly mistaken for a mundane problem. It was our belief that it was critical that the plaza design be recognized as an urban planning problem.

Our final solution was a careful synthesis of efficient function, and a technically sophisticated aesthetic. The key to generating our solution was the detailed analysis of the immediate surrounding context of each toll plaza site. We believed our thoughtful urban planning strategy produced a design that was sensitive in scale to its immediate surroundings, yet consistent in its imagery throughout the Tollway System. The essence of our solution lied in the recognition of the plaza design as a gateway to the city and as a powerful regional symbol for the Dallas/Fort Worth Metropolitan Area.

Alas, our design came up just a little short according to the NTTAs jury, but we are still very proud of the innovative solution we developed, and many of the design/planning principles we developed for this project we applied to our toll plaza designs for the Illinois Tollways Open Road Tolling program that we helped engineer from 2004 through 2007. So, as the cliché goes, when given a bag a lemons we chose to make lemonade, or since this was Texas, garlic/lemon/cilantro Steak sauce!