The Arts District developed following a 1977 study by Stephen Carr and Kevin Lynch of the city’s cultural facilities. The impetus for the study was the need to provide new facilities for the Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, both of which occupied aging and inadequate buildings at Fair Park. Sasaki Associates won the competition for a master plan (1983) to centralize the new facilities along an axis on Flora Street in the northeast quadrant of downtown, once a neighborhood of patrician houses. The Dallas Museum of Art terminates the west end of the newly landscaped Flora Avenue, and One Arts Plaza terminates the east. The economic recession of the late 1980s stifled ideas for mixed uses along the street, and the district has developed largely with art museums and performance halls. The city commissioned an update/revision for the thirty-three-year-old master plan in 2015 from NBBJ.
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