Tall rectangular arches extend from the rooftop of Pegasus Villas like shopping bag handles. Formerly Brookhollow Plaza, the 16-story building at Stemmons Freeway and Mockingbird Lane was designed by famed architect Paul Rudolph. (Guy Reynolds/Staff photographer)

On a recent afternoon, Betty Black-Dickerson, an 83-year-old retiree, could be found reading the paper in a lounge at Pegasus Villas, the well-tended apartment house for seniors that has been her home for nearly a decade.

“I like when you first walk in the door. It’s not closed in. There’s an openness to it,” she says of the building, which is set back behind a reflecting pool at the intersection of Stemmons Freeway and Mockingbird Lane.

Paul Freeman, a four-year resident who was checking his Facebook account in an adjacent library, shared her assessment of the 16-story tower. “It’s a real nice place to live,” he said. “I like the view.”

They are by no means anomalous. Recent visits indicate that residents of Pegasus Villas are happy with the building they call home, and indeed there is a considerable waiting list for its 167 units of affordable housing, all of which are currently occupied.

But neither Black-Dickerson, nor Freeman, nor any of the other residents interviewed had any idea that they are living in one of the city’s most idiosyncratic buildings, an experimental structure assembled like a child’s toy and designed by Paul Rudolph, one of the 20th century’s most prominent — and most controversial — architects.

For the retirees who call it home, it is simply a pleasant place to live, albeit a quirky one.

To most Dallasites it is hardly a landmark at all, but a fort-like tower with ominous blackened windows that suggest a CIA black-ops site.

Brookhollow Plaza, now Pegasus Villas, was designed by architect Paul Rudolph, who embraced concrete as an expressive medium, reveling in the freedom of form and texture that it could lend to his architecture. (Guy Reynolds/Staff photographer)

Typically it is seen at high speed — or, during rush hour, low speed —while driving along the weaving junction of Interstate 35 and Highway 183. If it is memorable at all, it is for the tall rectangular arches that project above its roofline, like the handles on a shopping bag. They are altogether more impressive from the building’s rooftop terraces, where they take on a practically archaic cast, framing views across the city toward distant horizons — Dallashenge.

That the building would now be a home for elderly would have seemed far-fetched to the men who conceived it in the late 1960s. Back then, it was seen as a vision of the future, one of four office towers interconnected by sky-bridges set dramatically around a decorative pond, a corporate city unto itself.

From the outset it was to be experimental, a prototype built using a concrete construction system that would, in theory at least, revolutionize the building industry. That idea was born of Ralph B. Rogers, the largely anonymous visionary businessman and philanthropist who did as much as anyone to build modern Dallas.

The exposed concrete skeleton on the roof of Pegasus Villas give Dallas its very own Stonehenge. (Mark Lamster/Staff)

By the late 1960s, his story was already the stuff of legend, even if few people knew it, then or now. Born in Boston in 1909, he graduated from the prestigious Boston Latin School, whose esteemed alumni include John Hancock, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leonard Bernstein, and another future Dallas leader in business and philanthropy: Raymond Nasher.

Rogers was smart enough to earn a scholarship to Harvard, but too poor to accept it. He entered the world of business and quickly made a fortune selling diesel engines. By his early 30s he was living in a Long Island mansion, a self-made Gatsby.

His seemed a charmed life until 1942, when he came down with rheumatic fever, which hospitalized him for nine months. Upon his release, he vowed to eradicate the disease. He established an institute to research it, recruited leading doctors, and led a campaign to fund their work. Within three years they succeeded. The fever, they determined, could be cured with antibiotics, and the disease was essentially wiped out.

In 1950 Rogers sold his businesses and moved to Dallas, ostensibly to retire in the city that was home to his wife’s family. But he was not the retiring sort, and in the year of their return he paid $312,250 for controlling interest in a firm that made concrete blocks.

Ralph B. Rogers

With that, he commenced a relentless campaign of expansion through mergers and acquisitions across the Southwest, building the company known as Texas Industries (or TXI) into a concrete behemoth.

Its Midlothian plant alone could pump out 1.4 million gallons of concrete a year. It was a shrewd strategy: The region was booming in the postwar years, and Rogers would provide the raw materials to build and pave it. By the time of his death in 1997, TXI was worth about $800 million.

In pursuit of corporate expansion, Rogers gathered 250 building industry executives for a luncheon at downtown’s Fairmont Hotel in late August 1969. “We, and you, have been alarmed about the scarcity of skilled labor and rising costs of labor and materials,” Rogers told them. “The best solution is standardization of building design and materials.”

A new Texas Industries subsidiary, ISOCORP, had been founded to market just such a system. If it seemed futuristic, that was fine, because it was a moment of possibility. Exactly one month earlier, Neil Armstrong had taken his small step-giant leap onto the surface of the moon.

The first, and indeed only, firm to make use of the ISOCORP system was another Texas Industries subsidiary, the Brookhollow Corporation, a real estate investment and development firm founded by Rogers’s son, John Rogers. Under his direction, the company had acquired the 1,200-acre Brookhollow site along the Stemmons Freeway, an area so vast it had its own post office.

There was something poetic about building a new concrete community there, too. Decades earlier, the chalky limestone directly south of the site on the opposite side of the Trinity had prompted the development of an entire municipality, Cement City, that was absorbed by Dallas in the 1950s and is now virtually erased from the map.

Here was the perfect synergy, then: Brookhollow could develop the property on land it owned, using its parent company’s own innovative concrete systems.

The only missing piece was an architect to design the project, and in that John Rogers knew exactly whom he wanted: Paul Rudolph, already lauded in Time magazine as an “architectural Wunderkind.”

Architect Paul Rudolph, Dean of Architecture at Yale University, and one of his designs, the Art and Architecture building at Yale. He also designed Brookhollow Plaza in Dallas and City Center in Fort Worth. (Courtesy Yale University )

“I knew about him because he was the dean of architecture at Yale, and that is where I went to college,” says Rogers. Rudolph had actually given up his deanship by the late 1960s, but Rogers was correct that there was nobody better suited to take on an experimental project using a system of prefabricated concrete modules.

Rudolph, by then, had come to almost literally embody the notion of inventive design using concrete. On the cover of its February 1964 issue, the magazine Progressive Architecture ran a portrait of Rudolph screened over the bush-hammered concrete façade — it looked like corduroy — of his recently completed Art & Architecture Building at Yale, a complex bunker of staggered floors and vertiginous spaces.

For Rudolph, design was almost a compulsion, an intuitive process that even he could not claim to comprehend. “I have no choice about certain combinations of forms, material, space, or architectural considerations,” he said. “They egg me on.”

Rogers was not the only North Texan to look to Rudolph. In 1966, the same year he was commissioned for the Brookhollow project, Rudolph began work on a sprawling concrete building for the physical sciences at Texas Christian University, a job that had come to him through Fort Worth financier Perry Bass, also a Yale graduate. Bass’ sons Sid and Robert Bass would also become important clients.

Rudolph embraced concrete as an expressive medium, reveling in the freedom of form and texture that it could lend to his architecture. He saw it, too, as an antidote to what he perceived as the sterility of the reflective glass curtain walls that had come to define the midcentury skyscraper.

This thinking was exemplified in New Haven’s Crawford Manor, a 14-story tower of fluted concrete blocks animated by ovular terraces that ran up its sides like zippers on an overcoat. It was completed in 1966 but anticipated the future of Brookhollow: From the outset, it was built as housing for the elderly.

The idea of an architecture of prefabricated modules had also been a fascination of Rudolph’s since his days as a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. There, he studied under the pioneering modernists Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann, who had launched their own prefab company, believing that only mass production could meet the needs of the century’s ever-growing demand for housing.

For Rudolph, mass replication of building units offered the possibility of building at a new and grander scale: a “topographical architecture” of city-spanning megastructures.

Sometimes this entailed shaping industrial processes to achieve his goals: When the corrugated effect he achieved through bush-hammering concrete by hand proved too expensive, for example, he developed a fluted concrete split-brick that could be manufactured by the thousands.

The observation deck of Pegasus Villas highlights Paul Rudolph’s use of concrete to create rich textures. By the 1960s Rudolph had come to almost literally embody the notion of inventive design using concrete. (Guy Reynolds/Staff photographer)

“Brookhollow was an important step for Rudolph in his investigation of concrete,” says Timothy M. Rohan, an architectural historian at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of a recent monograph on Rudolph. “For Brookhollow, he developed a system of panels that could be linked together to make buildings that could be as tall or as long as he liked — his dream of a limitless architecture come true.”

His visions, both real and imagined, often met with resistance. His plan for an expressway straddled by plug-in structures across lower Manhattan, initiated at virtually the same moment as the Brookhollow project, proved anathema to preservationists and urbanists alike.

In June 1969, while Brookhollow was still under construction, a fire of dubious origin, but presumed to be the work of disgruntled architecture students unhappy with their workplace, gutted much of Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale.

“There is no absolute way to know if Paul Rudolph is a man of great genius, a better-than-mediocre figure, or, perhaps, a charlatan,” warned one critic.

In Dallas, however, he was welcomed, especially at the office of Harwood K. Smith Associates (now HKS), on the 29th floor of the Southland Center. The Dallas-based firm was hired as the local architect on the project, charged with carrying out Rudolph’s plans.

“He was very cordial, as long as it was built toward his design,” says Owen Hooten, an architect who worked on the project at HKS. “I enjoyed sitting in some of the meetings with him. He was not a prima donna type fellow. You could talk to him. He didn’t get involved in the nuts of bolts of it.”

This, however, was not the experience of contractor Gil Andres, who had been hired to build the tower. “He would not speak to us,” says Andres. “He was just untouchable. We never spoke to the man. We did speak to Harwood K. Smith’s office. And they would say, well, Paul Rudolph won’t consider that.”

That recollection is confirmed by Hooten. “He’d get frustrated because Rudolph would come down and get with the Rogerses, and he wouldn’t find out about it,” he says.

The lack of communication was especially challenging given the complexities inherent in a project conceived as a test-case for new building materials.