The Southwest Medical District is a success when world-renowned medical care and research are the metrics, despite how inhospitable the district may be to real people. UT Southwestern Medical Center, Parkland, home of Children’s Health, is also Dallas’ largest heat island, with miles of concrete absorbing the sun’s rays. Its wide roads can encourage speeding and endanger pedestrians. It’s an alarming reality given that doctors, nurses, and students spread their time among the district’s vast campuses. This area off Interstate 35 was once an industrial area. Even though the hospital treats his 3.3 million patients and employs more than 42,000 people, that atmosphere still remains.
For the past seven years, the Texas Tree Foundation has imagined a new reality for the city’s vital economic and medical center. Medical District Overhaul sees this humble nonprofit organization boldly redesign a more than 1,000-acre district where doctors don’t have to dodge chargers and patients can find solace in nature. I was reborn as a design project manager.
Tonight, Texas Trees will announce that the project has reached 30 percent of design status. This is an important milestone that allows the city to begin planning engineering and federally mandated environmental permitting. It would also allow the federal government to consider the project “shovel ready,” increasing the project’s chances of receiving more federal funding.
This is a practical extension of the organization’s research on reducing urban heat islands while increasing urban tree canopy. But the work in the medical district also has a more holistic goal. Modern healthcare architecture has responded to a growing body of research showing that designing with patient experience in mind improves patient outcomes. This led to more spacious rooms, windows, improved lighting, and other ways to make patients more comfortable that were rarely considered in hospitals. All three of the area’s largest companies have adopted a “social design” philosophy in their new buildings. But the situation outside reflects the district’s history as an industrial center, where trucks roared along Motor His Avenue (now Medical District Drive).
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“Trails and bike networks help people become more active, gathering spaces create opportunities for social cohesion, and being able to retreat into nature has certain developmental benefits,” says Project Manager. said David Whitley, owner of DRW Planning Studio. “All of these things come together to improve the urban environment and the health of the urban environment.”
Based in New York, Field Operations’ Philadelphia office is leading the design effort as landscape architect. The project treats Harry Hines Boulevard as its spine, extending approximately two miles north from Market Center to Mockingbird. The first phase will pedestrianize Harry Hines from Butler Street to Medical District Drive, adding sidewalks away from traffic on both sides of the road and creating a thoroughfare that connects with the existing Trinity Strand. Add a two-way bike path to the south. Trail along the embankment. This means the medical district will have access to a 50-mile loop trail that connects the city’s existing trails and adds access to Trinity Forest.
For most of its life, Harry Hines was the state highway that connected Dallas residents to Denton. Drivers still treat it that way. Texas He Trees investigated corridor speeds and found that an average of 70% of drivers were traveling faster than the speed limit.
“In a normal world, [Harry Hines] It would have developed as a thoroughfare for the medical campus,” said David Biegler, president of the planning organization that helps coordinate efforts among partners in the Southwest Medical District. “That’s what you have to put it back together.”
The plan includes a Harry Hines tree line with wide sidewalks and bike paths, a park to replace the cloverleaf intersection that currently sees traffic from all directions, improved connectivity between campuses, and a park that the organization believes will lower temperatures. We envision strategic tree planting. In some areas, the temperature can reach close to 20 degrees. Officials were unable to get permission to enter the lanes because EMS personnel were nervous about ambulances coming and going, but the design allows the outer two lanes to serve as shelter for buses and emergency vehicles. The day will come. The main focus is to make streets safer by separating pedestrians from traffic.
This is the first phase of the redesign, which is expected to cost approximately $38 million. This portion is fully designed and the organization has raised enough funds to begin construction by the end of next year, but future infrastructure-related costs could increase the price. The organization also has just $4 million left to fund a second phase design focused on Inwood’s Harry Hines. Texas Trees plans to ask the city for permission to tear up the clover leaves and replace them with a 10-acre park that will serve the dual purpose of providing safer and easier access between campuses and providing much-needed green space. Renderings show limestone bluffs surrounding the area with grade changes and overlooks, hilltop lawns, and towering trees over tables and chairs. A footbridge is planned to allow pedestrians to cross Harry Hines, an important feature given there is currently no safe way for pedestrians to cross traffic.
Vehicles traveling on Inwood Street will pass through a tunnel under the park, and vehicles traveling on Harry Hines Street will pass through new traffic lights as they enter and exit the park. The park will be located between O’Donnell Grove and the Bird Sanctuary, which are currently the only two park-like facilities in the area.
“Going back to the coronavirus, nurses and doctors didn’t have a place to go out and immerse themselves and lower their stress levels,” said Janet, president and CEO of Texas Trees. Monia says. “We’re also working with hospitals. How can we connect their campuses with this?”
Much of the design is based on the team’s research. Texas Trees installed 58 temperature and humidity sensors along Harry Hines to try to measure various site conditions, including clear skies, “deep shade” from trees, and partial shade. Five anemometers, machines that measure wind conditions, were installed in areas with strong, moderate, and weak winds. The findings influenced the decision to install a two-way bike path on the south side of Harry Hines.
They surveyed users of the district about where they felt safest to walk and where they avoided extreme heat. Some thermometers showed large differences in temperature just a few feet apart from each other, especially near bus stops. The unshaded concrete area near the bus stop returned to 127 degrees, while the shaded area of the sidewalk less than 10 feet away was only 77 degrees. Texas Trees and her partner Hyphae Design Labs sought to collect examples of “microclimates” that could be adjusted by adding tree cover.
It turns out that standard tree-planting methods don’t work here. Generally, trees are planted at a distance of 30 feet from one center to the next. “Trees don’t grow that way,” Monia said. Instead, the group plans to plant trees in a grove along Harry Hines. There, the tree canopy can better mimic forest conditions, and typical public landscape design does not take tree ecology into account.
“Root grafts of the same species grow together, so if a drought occurs, they share nutrients and water,” she says. “And the fact that they shade each other reduces the rate of transpiration.” (This is when the trees lose water due to various conditions.)
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The renderings show dense stands of trees that will effectively shade the sidewalks and bike paths below, and Monner sees this as a new way to plant trees in public rights-of-way. She says this should double the lifespan of these trees, from an average of 15-20 years to 30-40 years.
“By bringing in the understory, you start to mimic the forest,” Whitley said. “You get the cooling effect of being on the forest floor, plus all the other mental and physical benefits of experiencing such an environment.”
There are significant economic benefits to improving this land, which City Hall has forgotten about. The Southwestern Medical District, located outside of the Baylor Scott and White campus just east of Deep Ellum, is effectively the health care hub for the city of Dallas and the entire region. As a result, this project has received financial interest from many organizations. Texas Trees has raised approximately $34 million for the project. That includes $13 million in private funding, $7.5 million in municipal bond funds from 2017, $7.5 million from the county and another $6 million from the North Central Texas Council of Governments. Monier said they need to raise another $4 million to fully fund Inwood’s park, and they hope to get federal money to do that.
The entire project is expected to cost about $190 million, with private financing accounting for about one-third.
Multi-billion dollar construction work is underway at the Southwestern Medical District. Children’s Hospital and the University of Texas Southwestern are building Harry Hines and his $5 billion pediatric campus in Mockingbird. The state of Texas has partnered with the University of Texas Southwestern to build the Texas Center for Behavioral Health, its first facility in Dallas. The University of Texas will soon be building his $120 million biomedical building, and the county is building new laboratories and research facilities here.
“The city’s view of the medical district, to be precise, is that the medical district is one of our major economic areas, a hub of economic activity that impacts the city and the region,” Biegler said. “You can’t create the environment that you need while having people go down Harry Hines at 90 miles per hour.”
Tonight, Texas Trees will chart a new path to recognizing the importance of its neighborhoods and caring for the people who frequent them — just as institutions have invested in neighboring buildings.
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Matt Goodman is Online Editorial Director. D MagazineHe writes about a surgeon who murdered someone.
