FIRM:
Rickenbacker + Leung LLP
Architecture
New York, NY

Project team:
Shawn Rickenbacker
Sam Leung
Sian Yew Lian
Chris Cahill
Hiroaki Sumikura
Daniel R Gutierrez
With Consultants:
Sarah Jane Wick – Community Development
Devon Prioleau – Environmental Design Strategist
Andy Moy – Envelope / Building Technology and Systems
Justin Chitwood – Greater Dallas Regional Research
Jennifer Bono – Visual Communications

Dallas Peaks
Acombined logic of natural and synthetic design strategies applied toward the builtenvironmentreveal an uncompromised newly formed urban ecology. The resonance of the new environmentstems from an economy of scale produced by a single architectural form thatfunctions atseveral scales: engineered landscape, infrastructure, habitation, social environmentand community.
Our proposal rejects generic and environmentally unresponsive architectural verticality in favor of building forms derived from environmental factoring: solar, air passage, water management, orientation and view corridors. The resultantform undeniably references natural hill formations of peaks and valleys.
The ecological sustainability and clarity of naturally formed peaks and valleys and stepped forms with respectto environmental equilibriums is well documented. Our projectis carefully directed by the beauty and functionality of numerous precedents such as hillside villages, terraced rice paddies and vineyards. Our proposal seeks to learn from and thus emulate the enormous resilience and compatibility these forms have with their environmentand putsuch consideration to use as a viable and livable Dallas community.
Demonstrative Assumptions
The singular, easily constructed rectilinear building form propagates in a stepped fashion allowing the projectto emerge from as opposed to simply arrive atthe site, grounding the projectto its specific locale. The stepped forms are further organized through a series of environmentally specific operations which incorporate solar orientation, shadow study placement, air passage, water management, inhabitantmovement, and program organization and sightline views.