Mark Lamster: Welcome to Paradox City

Join Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and Dallas architecture critic Mark Lamster for an engaging conversation with D Magazine's editor, Tim Rogers about the history of Dallas through the buildings that have defined it. Drawing from his acclaimed book, Welcome to Paradox City, Lamster explores how architecture has shaped the city’s identity, culture, and growth—from its origins as a frontier outpost to the dynamic metropolis it is today.

Blending architectural history, social history, and critical insight, this event offers a fresh perspective on the familiar places and structures that tell Dallas’s story—and invites us to consider what the city’s buildings reveal about its past, present, and future.

Tickets
Ticket + Signed Copy: $28

About the Book
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.

About the Author
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.