Join us at the Texas Book Festival, where Mark Lamster will discuss his book Welcome to Paradox City.
Mark Lamster in Conversation About Welcome to Paradox City
Join Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Lamster for a discussion of Welcome to Paradox City, a first-of-its-kind history told through Dallas’ most significant buildings. Lamster weaves architectural descriptions with social history to show the evolution of Dallas from its remote beginnings to its dynamic present. With passion and an architect’s keen eye, Lamster provides a compelling look at the people and the motivations behind the buildings that silently define a Texas metropolis.
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.
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.