Rendering of 3001 Dallas Parkway in Frisco

In case you missed it elsewhere, here’s a look at the newest speculative phase Craig Hall is readying at his Hall Office Park in Frisco. The 16th building in his sprawling development, the eight-story project at 3001 Dallas Parkway will total 200,000 square feet.

With demand outpacing availability, the timing was right to move forward said Hall, adding that encouragement and assistance from the City of Frisco and the Frisco Economic Development Corp., “help make this speculative project economically workable.”

Hall is well known for pioneering the Frisco office market. To date, he has built 15 buildings totaling 2 million square feet at his Frisco development. About 170 tenant companies with an employee population of 6,500 now occupy space at Hall Office Park.

Construction will get under way at 3001 Dallas Parkway in early 2013, with completion planned for April 2014.

Hall also is eager to pull the trigger on a planned Arts District office tower. He owns two blocks of land between Flora and and San Jacinto streets. Currently, the northern end of the site is home to a 2,000-spot underground parking garage.

Here’s more from a feature in D’s special issue on Klyde Warren Park:

Rendering of Hall Arts Center in downtown Dallas

The 17-story first phase of Hall Arts Center will total about 460,000 square feet of office space. Hall aims to get a building permit in December and start construction mid-year 2013, depending on the outcome of current discussions with prospective tenants. Restaurants and rooftop entertainment venues will be built with the first phase; the site also features green space.

Plans for future phases include a 29-story residential tower, a 45-story mixed-use building with a hotel on the lower floors, office in the middle, and 75 condominiums on top; and a fourth tower whose use is to be determined by market demand.

When Hall bought the Arts District property in the mid-1990s, he says he thought the downtown Dallas office market was ripe for a rebound. Instead, developers and higher-end tenants flocked to Uptown.

“We have had to just be patient with our land; you can’t build unless there’s a market,” he says. “We have downsized our [first] building from 1 million square feet to less than half of that. The people we bought it from had planned two 50-stories on the site; we’re going to do about a quarter of that.”

Hall says he’s cautiously optimistic that the park will help bridge the gap between Uptown and downtown—and not just in the physical sense. “I don’t know of any other downtown like this in the United States,” he says. “The way Uptown has pulled tenants out of downtown—the high-rises that were built in the 1980s and prior to that are suffering. You can literally lease the same space today for less than what you could 20 years ago. Other than maybe Detroit, I don’t know of any other city you could say that about.”

Read the full feature here.