The Tower Whisperer — Skyline Shaper Richard Keating Returns To Dallas With 2811 Maple, Pushing Things Higher In Texas

Architect Richard Keating designed some of the most iconic skyscrapers in Dallas and Houston, helping shape the skylines of Texas’ two biggest metropolises. Now he’s back with 2811 Maple, set to open in May as the tallest high-rise in Dallas’ coveted Uptown neighborhood. It comes from Crescent and aims to blur the distinction between sky-high residences for purchase and rent while invoking visions of a Los Angeles building full of bold names.

Towers always spoke to Richard Keating, with the tallest of man’s cloud nuzzling creations holding particular appeal. Sometimes to the chagrin of his architecture professors. Keating remembers that his teachers at the University of California at Berkley wanted him to “undoubtably write my PhD on classical architecture of some of sort. And I came back and was like ‘I’ve been thinking about this and cities are really the most interesting cultural artifacts of mankind. And throughout history, they are much more important than individual buildings. I really want to write my thesis on tall buildings and how they become a part of the city.’

“And nicely, they were sort of horrified by my decision in the academic world.”

Keating laughs. Maybe it should be no surprise that he is the architect behind the new 2811 Maple, the tallest residential building in Uptown Dallas, stretching up 31 floors developed by Crescent Real Estate LLC. Keating’s built a career that’s spanned five decades by making tall buildings sing. From The Gas Company Tower in Los Angeles to Trammell Crow Center, Dallas Arts Tower (formerly Chase Tower, known as the keyhole building for its distinctive top) and the renovation/reimagining of Renaissance Center in Dallas, plus Wells Fargo Plaza, El Paso Energy Building, CenterPoint Energy Plaza, and San Felipe Plaza in Houston, Keating’s shaped the skylines of some of America’s greatest cities.

“If all the tallest buildings are identical, you wouldn’t have much,” Keating tells PaperCity.

2811 Maple fits Keating’s drive to create something distinct that also fits into the fabric of its neighborhood and looks like it belongs. A limestone-geared exterior stretches up to windows and long balconies that protrude out of the tower, giving a very vertical building movement and accentuating the corner units, leading up to something of a canopy top. Joseph Pitchford, Crescent’s managing director of development, sees it as something new for Dallas.

“Rick’s work is infused with a sense of warm modernism that is so appealing in Southern California,” Pitchford says of first all-rental residential development in Dallas from Crescent. ”We wanted to bring that contemporary, light-filled aesthetic to urban Dallas. The result is a design featuring floor-to-ceiling glass and a bright, open feel that fills a need in the market. As anticipated, Rick delivered beautifully.”

“You can characterize high-rise buildings if they’re additive to the fabric of the city.” — architect Richard Keating

Richard Keating spent a decade in Houston after being charged with opening an office of SOM there in the mid 1970s, but his own firm Keating Architecture is based in Los Angeles. Texas remains one of his favorite canvases though and he sees this new 31-story tower in Uptown where units will rent from $4,175 to $19,500 (for the penthouses) a month as Dallas getting something that other cosmopolitan cities already possess.

“For me, high-rise residential that I’ve done in either Los Angeles or Chicago, you can’t tell the difference between a condo and an apartment,” he says.

This Tower Whisperer compares 2811 Maple favorably with Beverly West in Los Angeles, a 22-story high-rise with only 35 total residences that he designed overlooking the storied Los Angles Country Club’s North and South courses.

“You’d probably recognize the names of almost everybody who lives in a building like that,” Keating says of Beverly West. He calls 2811 Maple the closest thing he’s done to that exclusive enclave where units start at around $4 million and quickly skyrocket from there (a Beverly West penthouse sold for $24 million last year).

One does not need to be that rich to live at 2811 Maple, which is slated to open this May. Still Keating will tell you that the intentionality with which he approached the two high-rises remains the same. Richard Keating wanted a dignified lobby and the type of setback drive with lightning that creates a real sense of arrival in his new Dallas creation, insisted on it in many ways.

“The lobby is one of those things that’s terribly important in a high-rise building, even if it’s underused when you think about it,” Keating says. “Residents of a building almost never go there except to get their mail. But when your grandma comes to visit or your friends, they go through the lobby

“So it becomes the first message for all those people who live in the building. This is what my building is about.”

“The worst thing you can do is build a building where you have a situation, in a year or 20 years, where people look back on it and say, ‘That’s kind of a crappy addition to the city. I probably can come up with a few in Dallas.” — architect Richard Keating

Of course, a creator of skylines is naturally obsessed with the views. Why live in the sky if you’re not going to see anything worthwhile? Keating took on the challenge of a nearby office building potentially limiting the views of 2811 Maple by making more than 60 percent of its 117 residences corner units to “exaggerate the views of the downtown skyline.”

Why Going Higher Is More Humane

To Richard Keating building vertical represents making a choice for much more livable, safer cities. The current race to go taller and taller in New York City takes that expression to the extreme, leaning towers and all.

”How many Russian oligarchs are there, my gosh?” Keating muses. “On the other hand, having said that, I think again that building tall is something we’ve technically advanced in my lifetime. The elevators from The Sears Tower (to now) have advanced. We can sustain these buildings energy wise much more successfully.. But the most important thing is the land use.

“We cannot have cities sprawl all over. That’s Los Angeles and it’s a mess. . . Driving is awful. It’s not an urban life you want to live. The favorite place to live in all of mankind has always been the walk of the city. . . After the recent fires here in LA, we’re also realizing that building taller and more dense allows us to be safer.”

The king of artfully designed high-rises obsesses over giving his towers a sense of timeliness. Skyscrapers should not be trendy. These aren’t influencers or reality TV stars.

“The worst thing you can do is build a building where you have a situation, in a year or 20 years, where people look back on it and say, ‘That’s kind of a crappy addition to the city,’ “ Keating notes.

“I probably can come up with a few in Dallas.”

Timelessness serves as one of the longterm economic drivers of a high-rise like 2811 Maple. Crescent — which owns and/or developed The Crescent, The Ritz Carlton, Dallas hotel, The Luminary Dallas office building and more — turned to Keating for his ability to build towers that still matter across the generations. He focused on making the amenities level at 2811 Maple as high-end as possible, creating a private garden and places around the pool that almost become personal retreats, even if kids are splashing away in the water. (Keating Architecture also handled the landscape architecture for the Uptown high-rise, with MaRS crafting the interiors and Dallas-based GFF the architect of record for the building.)

“You can characterize high-rise buildings if they’re additive to the fabric of the city,” Keating says.

His old professors might not agree. But Richard Keating always knew civilization gets much more interesting in the sky.

2811 Maple is located on Maple Avenue, by the Uchi restaraunt, just north of Cedar Springs. For more information, call (888) 548-2811 or info@2811maple.com.