Dallas (The Big D)

Dallas is the third-largest (as estimated by the United States Census Bureau on 1 July 2006) city in the state of Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The city covers 385 square miles and is the county seat of Dallas County. As of July 1, 2006, U.S. Census estimates the population of Dallas at over 1,200,000 people.

Architecture
Dallas's skyline contains several buildings over 700 feet in height and the city is considered the fifteenth-tallest city on earth.

Most of the notable architecture in Dallas is modernist and postmodernist. Iconic examples of modernist architecture include I. M. Pei's Fountain Place, the Bank of America Plaza, Renaissance Tower, and Reunion Tower. Examples of postmodernist architecture include the JPMorgan Chase Tower and Comerica Bank Tower. Several smaller structures are fashioned in the Gothic Revival (Kirby Building) and neoclassical (Davis and Wilson Buildings) styles. One architectural “hotbed” in the city is a stretch of homes along Swiss Avenue, which contains all shades and variants of architecture from Victorian to neoclassical.

The building you see in the center of the mug with a ball on top is the Reunion Tower also known locally as The Ball, The Big Golf Ball, The Dandelion, The Circle Tower, or The Microphone, is a 560 foot observation tower and one of the most recognizable landmarks in Dallas, Texas. Located at 300 Reunion Blvd. in the Reunion district of downtown Dallas, the tower is part of the Hyatt Regency Hotel complex, and is the 15th tallest building in Dallas. A free standing structure until the construction of an addition to the Hyatt Regency Dallas in 2000, the tower was designed by the architectural firm Welton Becket & Associates.

The tower consists of three floors with circular floor plans on top of four shafts of poured in place concrete. A central cylindrical shaft houses stairs and mechanical equipment. Three rectangular shafts, containing elevators, rise parallel to the central shaft. Each shaft's outfacing wall is made up of glass panels, affording views of the city during the 68-second elevator ride to the top. The first level houses the observation deck, the second a revolving restaurant called Antares, and in the third level a club called The Dome. The top three floors are encased in an open air sphere. The sphere is a geodesic dome formed with aluminum struts. Each of the struts' 260 intersections are covered by aluminum circles with lights in the center.

Dallas from Reunion Tower's observation deck.At night, the globe at the top of the building lights with hundreds of bulbs that flash in various computer-generated patterns.