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Media Platforms Blueprint Team

Dallas has never been a metropolis that looks back for very long. And that fast-frontwards button is mashed downward especially hard now, when pockets hither are affluent and ambitions are high. Apartment towers are popping up like jonquils in bound. Jackhammers announce with gusto that the new theater by Dutch genius Rem Koolhaas is being built over here; over in that location will rise a new opera hall by British builder Norman Foster. The ribbons have been snipped on a W Hotel and a Ritz-Carlton, and some other luxury hotel, Mandarin Oriental, recently broke ground. Past the end of 2009, visitors will be able to see, on one block lone, four arts buildings designed by four dissimilar winners of architecture'south historic Pritzker prize: Koolhaas, Foster, Renzo Piano, and I. G. Pei. And construction is underway on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, an ethereal span past Castilian architect Santiago Calatrava that will cantankerous the zigzagging Trinity River and its low, lush banks.

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Media Platforms Design Team

Forget the Dallas that has been portrayed on television for decades, all big hair and cowboy boots. Founded every bit a trading post in 1841, this metropolis of i,250,000—the population ratchets up to 6 meg if you count the entire suburban sprawl, which makes it the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the land—is on the brink of condign the queen of the Southwest. "It's an emerging urban middle with all that implies: cultural, economic, design and fashion, gastronomic, architectural," says Frank Welch, the patriarch of progressive Texas architecture. So put the wagon wheels out of your mind, at least for a moment. Interior designers such as Jan Showers are busy glamorizing the city with deluxe furniture in mirrored Art Deco mode, and avant-garde buildings are everywhere you await, specially individual residences. Ane of the finest is the glass-and-enameled-aluminum home that Richard Meier designed for art-collecting grandees Cindy and Howard Rachofsky. Part individual residence, function museum, information technology seems untouchable behind its slatted gate on costly Preston Route, just information technology is open up for business—so take a guided bout of the gleaming white structure and come across the four tilted planes of grass that artist Robert Irwin created in the backyard. The house and its phenomenal collections take been promised to the Dallas Museum of Art in a landmark joint bequest by three local families. It is a jaw-dropping gift that will result in the donation of hundreds of works past modern-fine art provocateurs such as Lucio Fontana, Kiki Smith, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

For the architecturally inclined, there are multiple pilgrimages to make: the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, where the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre (Koolhaas) and the Margot and Pecker Winspear Opera House (Lord Foster) are under construction; and Pei's upside-down wedge of a city hall downtown and his luxe limestone Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. For a 1954 version of futurism, don't miss the embossed-aluminum Republic Center Tower I downtown, consummate with a rocketlike spire. Posh Highland Park is packed with 1920s mansions built for newly monied nabobs, and Turtle Creek Boulevard is lined with elegant midcentury high-rises. One picturesque exception to the space-age apartment buildings forth this storied thoroughfare is the whitewashed Arlington Hall at Lee Park—it's a copy of Robert E. Lee's Virginia mansion—where grande-dame decorator Beverly Field held her wedding reception way dorsum when considering, she maintains, information technology was as shut as she could come up to "a piece of good Palladian in this town."

Experiencing the barrel-vaulted Nasher Sculpture Center is another principal-architect essential. Designed by Piano, it houses a mind-boggling collection that was assembled by Raymond Nasher, the late real-estate developer, and his wife, Patsy, who had a passion for the works of Calder, Giacometti, Miró, and Moore. Across the street from the Nasher stands the Dallas Museum of Art, a regional powerhouse with more than than 23,000 works, including African, ancient American, and gimmicky. Tucked within it is a mini-museum fabricated upwardly of 5 rooms reproduced from Coco Chanel'southward South of France villa, jammed with antiques and Impressionist paintings collected by a afterwards owner of the house, Wendy Reves, a Texas-born fashion model turned Winston Churchill confidante.

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Media Platforms Design Team

If y'all are in the mood to peruse stellar art by homegrown talents, set up your sights a few minutes due north to Tracy Street, where Talley Dunn and Lisa Brown of Dunn and Brown Contemporary correspond some of the all-time the state has to offer, including Vernon Fisher, Sam Gummelt, David Bates, and Nic Nicosia. And a number of major art galleries, both established and new, have been packing up their canvases and heading to Dragon Street in the increasingly magnetic design district. "Nosotros are finally reaching a younger generation of Dallasites, and it's making a divergence beyond the lath," contemporary dealer Holly Johnson says. "The urban center is extremely energetic and has thrust itself well into the 21st century."

This appetite for all things up-to-the-minute extends to dining likewise, so unfurl a napkin. Though there's plenty great Tex-Mex hither to keep any enchilada fan satisfied, Dallas is rife with fresh-faced restaurants manned by young chefs going their own ways. Seek out the tiny spot chosen York Street, where demure Sharon Hage (she'll never tell y'all she's been nominated 4 times for best chef in the Southwest past the James Beard Foundation) changes the menu daily. Some of Hage's contempo delicacies have included skate with a lobster-and-saffron broth and rabbit braised in Moscato. In the forever-upwardly-and-coming urban neighborhood known as Deep Ellum is the restaurant Local, where Tracy Miller, an equally modest kitchen talent, spins condolement food into heavenly fare for a clientele she calls "sophisticated in a friendly manner, discerning, confident, and eager."

Miller'south words unwittingly describe Dallas to a tee. A brusque drive across the Trinity River lands yous in the maverick burg of Oak Cliff, with the buzzy Belmont Hotel (a recently restored 1946 colonial-Moderne motor inn whose bar and bistro are frequented by Dallas'due south hip café society) and Bishop arts district, the latter invigorated with clever shops (east.g., the Soda Gallery for obscure colas) and restaurants (Hattie'south for low-country Southern; Veracruz Café for Mexican-Mayan). There's even a new neighborhood watering pigsty, Quinn, where the hummus is as flavorful as the conversation. Only the identify where they're packed Prada to Prada is Tillman's Roadhouse, a riot of pino-plank walls and crystal chandeliers that is a plumbing equipment backdrop for chef Dan Landsberg'south gourmet regional food: The menu includes skillet corn bread, chipotle BBQ ribs, even tableside s'mores.

"There is no fear here when it comes to making a personal statement," Brian Bolke says. He is, in fact, not talking nutrient; he's talking mode. A co-owner of Forty Five Ten, the foremost bazaar in this role of the Solitary Star Land, Bolke and partner Shelly Musselman shower Comme des Garçons, Dries Van Noten, and Maison Martin Margiela on the metropolis's edgiest-dressed residents, including the Grammy-winning R&B vocaliser Erykah Badu (nonresidents like Gwyneth Paltrow are clients too). Independent shops with strong points of view are plentiful in these parts, similar the new Elle by Elements, a spin-off of Elements, a highly admired local bazaar.

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Media Platforms Design Team

Dallas is a city full of people who dear what they wear—dressing well is what the century-one-time department store Neiman Marcus is congenital on—and now there'due south a monument to celebrate their sartorial devotion. Selections from the fifteen,000-plus pieces of the Texas Style Collection—Chanels, Balenciagas, Norells, and and so much more stored at the University of North Texas in Denton, 40 minutes due north of the city—are now displayed at Style on Main, an exhibition space located in the skyscrapered downtown. "Mode has an intangible allure," says Heidi Dillon, who helped spearhead the project and led its early fundraising efforts. "Information technology attracts glamour, money, beauty, and commerce to a city. Look at what the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art's Costume Institute does for New York. We want that for Dallas."

When you've had about all the red-carpeting glamour you tin handle, there is e'er coolly quirky home decor. A must-see is Grange Hall in the humming Knox-Henderson neighborhood, where owners Jeffrey Marion Lee and Rajan Patel proposition Nymphenburg porcelain and eccentric accessories such as safety-dipped chandeliers. At Collage 20th Century Classics, married tastemakers Abby and Wlodek Malowanczyk accept established a niche for aesthetes who seek "fine and cute original blueprint, revolutionary for its time." Some of the store's recent offerings have included a 1930s Northern European sofa of button-tufted leather, '60s chrome chairs past Greek-American modernist Nicos Zographos, and a 1915 sterling-silver coffee set past Georg Jensen.

Jackie Bolin knows all about the new and revolutionary: The former style editor simply chucked it all to chase her dream of opening a clothing bazaar for cerebral young moderns looking for "something not and so finished or fussy." The shop she co-owns, 5.O.D., is located in Victory Park, a master-planned downtown community that blinks with colossal LED screens and brims with shops, restaurants, and sparkling new apartment buildings, including one by Philippe Starck that is going upwards this minute. Luella Bartley, Alexander Wang, and up-and-comers Jenni Kayne and Brian Reyes are only some of V.O.D.'s lines, not only for the Dallas shopper who "wants what no one else has," Bolin says, but for travelers too. "Dallas," she says resolutely, "is poised to become an oasis for jet-setting coast dwellers, smack in the middle of the country."