The nearly three-thousand-acre master-planned district, started in the early 1980s by Texas entrepreneur Ross Perot, includes over fifteen million square feet of corporate campuses, office buildings, data centers, retail, and residential areas. Corporate headquarters include Frito-Lay, Hewlett Packard, J. C. Penney, Chase Bank, Liberty Mutual Insurance, and Toyota North America. The large complex, which represents the range of early-twenty-first-century commercial designs, can only be glimpsed from perimeter roads due to controlled access.
The Legacy Town Center, a mix of apartments over restaurants and retail space, is built around a central space dominated by a lake. A New Urbanism master plan (2000, RTKL) provided for the updated “live-work-play” mix that contrasts with the concept of office buildings behind large setbacks in the original Legacy plan.