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Kevin Warren Sloan | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 8, 1957 |
| Died | October 29, 2021 (aged 63) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Kansas State University, Syracuse University |
Kevin Sloan was a landscape architect, urban planner and writer with international scope, located in Dallas, Texas. He was the founder and director of Kevin Sloan Studio, a design studio principally concerned with the urban design and landscape architectural problems generated by the metropolitan city and its new and unprecedented formation. He taught architecture, urban design and landscape architecture at a number of universities and colleges, including as a visiting professor at Syracuse University in Florence, Italy. He contributed numerous journal articles and is a former columnist on architecture and design for Dallas Downtown Business News.
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Sloan’s built works encompass new prototypes, landscape systems and environmental strategies that address the ecology of the American Southwest and its similarities with North Africa – which share the same latitude. Works generally fall within the category of “landscape urbanism.” By transforming a typical street into “biofiltration machine,” at Urban Reserve Dallas [1] he won international recognition from Eco-Structure magazine [2] as one of seven notable environmental projects in 2009.
Sloan authored and championed the idea of the "DFW Branch Waters Network," an idea to organize the sprawling Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex around the area's underlying network of the Trinity Watershed. This would allow many existing neighborhoods to develop local parks, allowing a "re-wilding" of urban areas in select sections, and give new life to areas where new development could thrive. The Branch Waters would easily intersect with the existing and future hike and bike trail system, and expand the efforts of municipal and community groups interested in water quality, recreation, development and the natural environment. The idea includes taking part of the Trinity River floodplain and re-converting it to a Blackland Prairie wetland, providing a place for the wild animals who have moved back into the Metroplex, such as bobcats, alligators, coyotes, foxes, and all the birds that travel down the Central Migratory Flyway, making Dallas a haven for birders and wildlife educators. The 300+ miles of waterways in the DFW area could create a "natural" urban environment unique in the whole world.
Sloan specialized in, and conducted seminars on, “notational drawing, [3] ” an analytical drawing technique for measuring and diagramming world places, as the generative basis for new design works.
While earning a master of architecture from Syracuse University (1992), he won a graduate fellowship to study in Florence, Italy, and the Britton Medal for best architectural thesis project. He held a bachelor of landscape architecture from Kansas State University (1980).
Kevin Sloan Studio projects include a redesign of the landscape at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas; the Airfield Falls Conservation Park in Fort Worth, Texas; the urban design for Vitruvian Park, a 100-acre mixed use development in north Dallas; the master plan for a large mixed-use and public park project in Kansas City; the master plan and landscape architecture for the award-winning single-family development The Dallas Urban Reserve; and the master plan for the Southern Methodist University’s winning submission for the George W. Bush Presidential Library. [4]
