The Dallas Morning News:

Accompanied by popping corks, dessert sushi and chocolate-covered kumquat lollipops, the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts unveiled its two eye-popping centerpieces Tuesday night: an opera house resembling a gigantic red egg and a theater that looks like an upside-down skyscraper.
Unique designs unveiled for Dallas theater, opera By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News
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Accompanied by popping corks, dessert sushi and chocolate-covered kumquat lollipops, the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts unveiled its two eye-popping centerpieces Tuesday night: an opera house resembling a gigantic red egg and a theater that looks like an upside-down skyscraper.

At a gala party at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Sir Norman Foster, founder of one of the world's most acclaimed architecture firms, presented plans for the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, a massive red shape inside a delicate glass box. It will seat 2,200 people and cost about $140 million, roughly half the $275 million budget for the entire performing arts center. The main auditorium will form a horseshoe and be surrounded by lobbies and cafes that open to a plaza.


The main auditorium of the Winspear Opera House will be surrounded by lobbies and cafes that open onto a plaza. "This is a pivotal moment for the [Arts] District," he said, "when you have the visual arts on one side and the performing arts on the other. There is an opportunity for this building to be more than an opera house, to reach out with its cafes and promenades and protective canopies to create social events as well as cultural ones."

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas struck a similar populist note with the Charles and Dee Wyly Theatre, an 11-story tower across Flora Street from the opera house. A flexible glass-walled theater will occupy the lower levels, with offices, studios and other spaces stacked above.

"Height allows a mall building to hold its own among larger neighbors," project architect Joshua Ramus said. "If it were quiet and modest, it wouldn't be the populist building we want."


A redesigned Annette Strauss Artist Square, the district's outdoor venue, completes the basic design. The main performance area will now sit behind the Meyerson, facing west, with a broad landscaped plaza linking it to the adjacent opera house.

"We had high expectations when we hired these two architects, and I think they have been fulfilled," said Bill Lively, president of the performing arts center foundation. "The buildings are very different, but each is beautiful in its own way."

Mr. Lively expects construction on both to begin in 2006, once the underground parking garage is finished. The center, including the publicly financed City Performance Hall, is scheduled to open in fall 2009.


E-mail ddillon@dallasnews.com


Theater, opera house taking active role in cityscape
By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News
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The head-spinning designs for the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts presented Tuesday by architects Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas represent a dramatic break from the current low-slung, limestone aesthetic of the Arts District. The Winspear Opera House will be its first glass building, the Wyly Theatre its first tower. These are not neutral ensemble buildings intended to blend seamlessly with their surroundings; they are high-octane foreground pieces meant to snap the district – and downtown – to attention.


Because it opens up to cafes and plazas, the opera house lends itself to social and cultural events, the architect says. The $140 million opera house is the more traditional of the two, with a horseshoe auditorium seating 2,200 people – considered acoustically optimal – arranged in ascending tiers like La Scala or Covent Garden. The main lobby is a series of curving glass planes, rising some 60 feet and topped by a dramatic canopy that looks like a grander and more athletic version of the one at the firm's Carre de Art in Nimes, France. In benign spring and fall weather, the lobby can be thrown open to give audiences direct access to the outdoor plaza.

Although the details are still in flux, the basic concept is to dissolve the barriers between inside and outside, public and private. The architects obviously studied the existing Arts District and concluded, correctly, that it is a series of private enclaves where public life is mostly an accident.

"The last thing we want is a cultural ghetto," says Spencer de Grey, lead designer for the opera house. "We want the influence of both projects to extend through and beyond the district. It would be wonderful to have a great pedestrian bridge over the freeway, for example."

Mr. Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture are pursuing transparency and flexibility using a more urban strategy. This celebrator of congestion and serendipity has stripped away the foyers, lobbies, rehearsal rooms and other spaces that usually wrap a theater and stacked them overhead, making the theater into a kind of apartment house or an athletic club. The result, for him, is a surprisingly simple, compact, straightforward design.


"Basically, we have taken the veneer off in order to express the entire perimeter," says project architect Joshua Ramus. "We are dedicating more of the financial resources of the project to achieving flexibility than to conventional architecture."

As with the opera house, that perimeter will be mostly glass walls that can open to outdoor plazas, depending on the weather. Instead of a single front door, audiences will enter and leave from different points depending on the production and the wishes of the artistic director. Likewise, the stage can be reconfigured in a matter of hours from proscenium to thrust, arena and black box, using a combination of lifts, pulleys, turntables and other mechanical apparatus. From this perspective, the theater itself becomes a kind of performer.

Mr. de Grey has said repeatedly that landscape is the key to pulling the Arts District together. He envisions it as a kind of extended urban garden, with canopies of trees, numerous pocket parks and plenty of water. Yet at this stage the landscaping component is invisible. Preliminary schemes by French landscape architect Michel Desvigne were fragmentary and unconvincing; The team has recently been expanded, however, so a more coherent, unifying design may appear in the next few months.

The Wyly Theatre features a glass-walled theater on the lower levels, with offices and studios above. It will be interesting to see how enthusiastically Mr. Koolhaas embraces the "greening idea." He prefers toughness to trees, with most of the action in his buildings being on the inside. Whether Mr. de Grey can win him over remains to be seen. For all the chatter about collaboration, the two architecture firms have reportedly behaved more like heavyweights feeling each other out in the early rounds. Asked a few weeks ago what the Koolhaas design looked like, Mr. de Grey replied, "You probably know a lot more about it than we do."

Annette Strauss Artist Square, the district's most popular venue, has been substantially redesigned since the first master plan was released in September. Instead of being wedged between the opera house and Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, a location that angered many people, it has been relocated behind the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, with the stage facing west. This gives it a more discrete identity and also reduces the ambient sound swirling around the Meyerson and the opera house.

The master plan, like the buildings themselves, is still a work in progress. The first version was little more than a siting diagram for two buildings, almost a studio problem. Mr. de Grey says he hopes the public will participate in its development down the road, a good idea provided the performing arts center foundation is willing to engage and listen to the public. That's not been the case so far; solid information has been slow in coming and mightily spun for maximum public-relations effect, which is not the same thing as maximum public enlightenment.

That said, there is plenty to be excited about with these two new buildings: the play of bold forms and new materials, the variations in scale, the emphasis on transparency and civic engagement and on making the spaces between the buildings as engaging as the buildings themselves.

We've been here before, of course. Many architects have promised to turn the Arts District into a Times Square or Ramblas or Trafalgar. It was just so much rhetorical static.

What Dallas needs is a plan for this place in this city, not a litany of historic analogies. The goal is to make the entire district as engaging, exciting and memorable as the new buildings promise to be.