Review: A 'Football Oz' in North Texas

Mark Lamster writes a review of the Dallas Cowboy headquarters, The Star, located in Frisco, Texas. Lamster places the tradition of the Dallas Cowboys as "America's Team" before shifting the history to the tenure of current owner Jerry Jones.

In Frisco, he has built it a genuine capital, a shimmering football Oz that emerges like a spectral vision from the blank canvas of North Texas nothingness. It is a miniature city, a 91-acre branded corporate headquarters and entertainment complex dedicated to football, consumption and — above all — profit.

The Star is not to be confused with AT&T, which opened in 2009 with a price tag of more than a billion dollars including more than $300 million in public funding. According to Lamster, however, the style of both complexes works in concert.

As at the team's AT&T Stadium in Arlington — a.k.a. Jerry World — the architectural language of the Star is unapologetically modern. It is a city of reflective surfaces, of glass and metal and white concrete that dazzles in the sun, and it is blessedly free of the kitschy, nostalgic elements common to sports design. "We talk about the past but we build for the future," a team representative told me.

Lamster also compares to a warmer, more vernacular style of architecture that is also found in Texas, and laments the auto-orientation of the complex ("understandable" but "unfortunate," writes Lamster). A follow up article by Christopher Wynn breaks Lamster's points into a tl;dr list.