Perot Museum of Nature and Science

The Perot Museum is the building you notice from Woodall Rodgers Freeway: a rough-textured concrete cube by the architect Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis, with a glass tube clinging to its face that carries an escalator up the outside of the building. Inside are five floors of hands-on science, and it is the museum Dallas families return to again and again. The visit is designed top-down: you ride the escalator — nicknamed the T. rexcalator — to Level 4 and work your way down by stairs, which means you start in the life-then-and-now dinosaur hall with its towering skeletons, including the long-necked Alamosaurus, a sauropod that actually roamed Texas, and a gallery of fossils dug by the museum's own paleontologists. The other halls take in gems and minerals glittering in a darkened vault, the energy hall with its simulated drilling and fracking explanations (this is Texas, after all), an earthquake and weather hall, a sports hall where you can race against animals and pro athletes on a sprint track, an engineering and innovation hall where kids design and test robots and cars, a life-sciences hall on the human body, and a children's museum level for the under-fives. The museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate and stages a rotating program of special exhibitions and films in its theater, sometimes for an extra fee. All admission is timed-entry, so book a slot online; field trips crowd the halls on weekday mornings, so afternoons and Sunday mornings are calmer. Plan on three hours with children, longer if a special exhibition is on.

The museum opened in 2012, born of a merger of older Dallas science and natural-history museums and named for the children of Ross Perot and Margot Perot, who gave the lead gift for the building. Its location is deliberate: it sits at the north edge of the Arts District beside Victory Park, one of the anchors of a plan to stitch the downtown cultural district together, and Klyde Warren Park is a short walk away. The architecture divides opinion — the exterior is meant to evoke stratified rock, the landscaped roof reflects native Texas terrain, and the escalator tube gives a panoramic view of the skyline as you rise — but nobody leaves bored.

Logistics: the museum generally opens mid-morning and closes late afternoon, with a café serving lunch; check the hours page for special late events and holiday schedules. Tickets are date-and-time specific and bought online, arriving by email; if you use a Dallas CityPASS, the Perot is one of its included attractions but you still reserve a time on the museum's site using your pass barcode. Adult prices are in line with other big-city science museums, with lower youth rates, and special exhibitions or films can cost extra. The main parking lot is underneath the Woodall Rodgers Freeway beside the building, for a fee. Food and drink are not allowed in exhibit halls, apart from water bottles. Weekday mornings from Wednesday to Friday are dominated by school groups until early afternoon.

Strategy with kids: ride the escalator first thing for the view and the dinosaurs while energy is high, then let the children choose — the sports-hall sprint track and engineering hall are the usual winners, while gem-lovers can lose an hour in the mineral vault. Toddlers have their own floor, so families with mixed ages can split up. Adults without children will still enjoy the dinosaur hall, the gems and the building, but can do it in ninety minutes. Combine it with lunch from the food trucks at Klyde Warren Park and an hour at the free Dallas Museum of Art, and you have an Arts District day that works for every age.