Welcome to Paradox City by Mark Lamster boasts a blend of architectural history, social history, and critical writing that takes readers from the sun-scorched origins of Dallas as a remote outpost on the Texas frontier and traces its development into the dynamic, if imperfect, metropolis we know today.
Here Lamster presents an illuminating 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.
Lamster is the Dallas Morning News architecture critic and the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Criticism. He is the author of several books, including the biography The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Additionally, he was a 2017 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the recipient of the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism.
