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Suburban Underground Vadders
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While traveling for Thanksgiving I made some plans to stop for some exploring in Dallas. I met up with Dirtbag and we drove around and scouted a few places. Later, Noah Vale ( http://www.texploration.org ) showed up. Unfortunately Dirtbag wasn’t feeling well so Noah and I had to go on without him.
The building
above was one of several places we hit that night. Not a lot is known about
this building other than it was started probably more than 10 years ago
*UPDATE* I was recently informed differently. Here is some info I recieved from an unnammed architect:
"I guess you probably have had a bit of mail on this site you visited and I may not be telling you anything you don't know by now. First the building was occupied by the Mobil Corporation for many years. In fact, they originally comissioned Paul Rudolph, pretty famous american architect to do it for them as a corporate office. It was built using precast modular construction. It was a daring and unique architectural statement for the time. And would be for today as well. After Mobil sold it ad moved out to bigger digs down the road to an existing building they renovated in the 90's the building fell into question. Seems there is a lot of asbestos in the building that will be expensive to clean up and the floor layout is not easy to rent out to multiple tenants. As time went on the outlying parking lots were sold off. The litt motel to the South was the first to be built. Now the site is extremely cramped and a real architectural jewel is sitting all alone just slowly passing into the night as it were. I have heard rumors that someone has tried to convert it to condos, but nothing has been happening at the site for about a year. I certainly hope something is done, it would be a shame to see a great piece of rudolph's work come down. ( I think it is the only piece of his work we have in the DFW area.)"
Most of the floors are completely empty and nearly identical so we went straight to the roof to check out the view. Here is Noah attempting to photograph the lights of the city.
Unfortunately by the time we made it to this building the fog had already rolled in thick. We should have been able to see the downtown Dallas skyline from the top of this building but because of the fog, we weren’t entirely sure exactly where it was.
You could, however, see the highway from the top and it made for some good long exposure traffic tracers.
One of the strangest features of this building was that it had Stonehenge-like structures on the roof. Not really sure what they could’ve been for.
Reflection.
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