Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas as Told Through Its Architecture - Hardcover

by Mark Lamster (Author)

A first-of-its-kind history of Dallas told through the city's most significant buildings.

With an exceptional blend of architectural history, social history, and critical writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Lamster takes readers to the sun-scorched origins of Dallas as a remote outpost on the Texas frontier, then traces the city's development into the dynamic, if imperfect, metropolis we know today. Welcome to Paradox City is an illuminating, illustrated look at the often-invisible ways that architecture shapes a city and its culture from its founding, to the present, and onward into the future.

Author Biography

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News and the winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 2021, he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for Arts Journalism, and in 2017 a Loeb fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is the author of several books, including The Man in the Glass House, a biography of the late architect Philip Johnson, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.