The insistent barrel vaults on the roof of the sixty-story office tower and on each of its setbacks provide a distinctive identity on the Dallas skyline. This normally desirable effect was unfortunately lost by the building’s troubled financial history. The tower and its banking lobby on S. Ervay Street were built as headquarters for MBank Corp, formerly the Mercantile National Bank, one of Dallas’s oldest financial institutions, which crashed in 1987, with developers and financiers suing over ownership. After several foreclosures and sales, the building was acquired in 2007 by Comerica. The project was also the last collaboration between architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee. Johnson’s biographer Frank Welch noted in his Philip Johnson & Texas (2000) that “its huge budget and reach for attention with celebrity architects are sadly

symbolic of the entire 1980s hubris of greedy excess that infected Texas to a greater degree than it did the rest of the nation.” The basic cruciform plan has detailing that is vaguely classical, including exterior cornices with oversized dentils, Greco-Roman X-patterns on glazing and balcony rails, and more big dentils on balcony spandrels, implying an imperial power and stability that soon proved to be fragile.