Performing Arts

This story first appeared in The Dallas Morning News on March 27, 2005.

When last seen, Rem Koolhaas and Sir Norman Foster were engaged in high-stakes architectural gamesmanship at the Meyerson Symphony Center, one showcasing an industrial-strength theater, the other a shimmering glass opera house with a glowing red core.

These are the flashy centerpieces of the $275 million Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, one of the most important cultural projects in the city's history and the exclamation point for its evolving Arts District.

The architects, both winners of the Pritzker Prize, the profession's highest honor, were selected in 2001 to create a new civic and cultural heart for the district. Yet that evening in June, collaboration appeared to be the last thing on their minds. They emerged from separate green rooms to present their designs to a black tie and bejeweled audience, then kept a cool distance during the reception afterwards, like rival movie stars thrown together by over-eager publicists.

Forward nine months: The Margot and William Winspear Opera House and the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre are moving ahead - the revised design for the latter will be unveiled Tuesday at the Dallas Museum of Art - but the big chill between the principals continues. The standoff complicates already difficult trans-Atlantic logistics, involving three architecture firms in three countries: France, Britain and the Netherlands.

They and their lead designers rarely show up in Dallas at the same time, preferring to communicate by e-mail, fax, conference calls and intermediaries. For a critical design meeting last week, only Spencer de Grey of the Foster office in London made the trip. Koolhaas associate Joshua Prince-Ramus, project architect for the Wyly Theatre, was in the Netherlands, and landscape architect Michel Desvigne was in Paris.

This pattern has produced frustration among performing arts center staff and some members of the building committees, who complain privately about lack of coordination and their once-a-month access to the decision-makers.

"We'd all be much happier if the two firms were comfortable sitting in the same room together," says Deb Mitchell, senior vice president for JJR Inc., the firm supervising the landscape design. "But there's not a lot of warm fuzzy feeling between them."

Foster and Partners and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, as Mr. Koolhaas' firm is called, inhabit different design universes: Foster linear, machine-smooth and precise as a Swiss watch, OMA messy, conceptual and intentionally jarring.

Other collaborations

Productive collaboration doesn't require that architects like each other. At the Meyerson, I.M. Pei and acoustician Russell Johnson faced off like a cobra and a mongoose until Morton H. Meyerson himself banged their heads together and heard a sound he liked.

Up Flora Street at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Renzo Piano and landscape architect Peter Walker threw off so many sparks that they were rarely invited to town at the same time. Raymond Nasher finally sat them down for a heart to heart, and the result is a small masterpiece of collaborative design.

No such enforcer has emerged at the performing arts center, though Bill Lively, president and CEO of its foundation, says that all projects are on schedule and on budget

"It's certainly been more challenging working with architects from Europe," Mr. Lively says, "but I don't think that has compromised us. It's not like there's been a vacuum."

However, planning and urban design, the basis for true place-making, have taken a back seat to architecture. The "master plan" unveiled in fall 2003 was little more than a device for placing the two buildings, while the site plan itself, the critical first step in any major development, is barely under way after two years.

"It's certainly much later in the process than I'd like," says Mockingbird Station developer Ken Hughes, a member of the site design committee.

"We made a conscious decision to address the architecture first," says Mr. Lively, "because the quality and functionality of the buildings is the most important thing. If they don't work, the whole project is for naught."

Yet this seem at odds with the foundation's own holistic pronouncements that the center is not only about three buildings (the opera house; the Wyly, new home to the Dallas Theater Center; and a City Performance Hall for smaller groups), but about creating a memorable civic destination where people will want to gather even if they don't have tickets to a performance.

"Great architecture won't be enough," says Deedie Rose, a founding board member. "We need a great place for the community to be, and that means all the public spaces have to be wonderful, too."

Such spaces don't just appear, like residue from construction. They come from careful planning informed by a shared understanding of basic principles for designing the public realm. "A street is a room by agreement," the architect Louis Kahn observed, and the same can be said of great squares, plazas and parks. Trafalgar Square in London, Central Park in New York, the Ramblas in Barcelona, Spain - all are products of such agreements.

Progress being made

Nevertheless, things are moving forward at the performing arts center.

Fund-raising is approaching $170 million, almost all of it from private sources, with about $90 to $100 million more required.

The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts Foundation is negotiating a long-term operating agreement with the city to maintain the center once it is finished. That could be completed by May.

And one key component, the Wyly Theatre, has evolved from a tantalizing but vague concept into a compelling, workable model. It is still an 11-story tower with 600 seats and a simple cubic form that plays suggestively against the horizontality of the rest of the Arts District. The stage is at street level, with all the support spaces stacked above, including a rooftop cafe.

In the version premiering Tuesday, the skin has been articulated to resemble a slightly billowy theater curtain, circulation has been clarified, and the relationship between interior and exterior spaces refined.

The status of the 2,200-seat Winspear Opera House, designed by Mr. de Grey of Foster and Partners, is harder to peg, in part because until last week Foster and Partners had been more secretive than the CIA about this work in progress.

Mr. de Grey's initial design was disarmingly simple and elegant: a red, multi-tiered auditorium, reminiscent of classic European opera houses, with mezzanines and lobbies framed in glass and shaded by an aluminum canopy that extended over a public plaza.

"We didn't want a temple of high culture," he says of it. "We wanted to create a democratic public space where people will gather, to break down barriers."

The populist premise remains intact in the latest version, which could see the light in late May, but many details have evolved. A restaurant and cafe now open onto the east side of the Grand Plaza, toward the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, while ramps for the underground garage slice into the southwest corner near the Meyerson, (and escalators pop up near the main entrance. The goal is for patrons to enter the building through the front door instead of from the garage, as in the Meyerson and the DMA.

And the canopy continues to evolve, appearing considerably lighter and airier than earlier versions, which covered most of the area between the Meyerson and the Arts Magnet High School, and to more than one observer made the opera house look like a tug boat stuck in an ice floe. The canopy has reportedly been a contentious issue among some board members concerned about its scale, cost and feasibility.

The latest version measures 370 by 440 feet, which is still huge yet less oppressive, more like a metal web than a roof. Drawings show cafe tables, tents, kiosks and fountains laid out below.

Mr. de Grey says there is nothing controversial about the canopy. "It's been in the budget from the beginning, and we've had some very positive feedback about it."

Foster and Partners is under fire for a massive swooping canopy proposed for the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong. Detractors say it is structurally unsound and might create an instant greenhouse effect, accusations the architects vigorously dispute.

The third piece of the center, the $25 million City Performance Hall by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago and Corgan Associates of Dallas, is in limbo. Voters approved $2 million for preliminary design in 2003, but the remainder of the funding awaits the next municipal bond election, tentatively scheduled for 2007.

"We think we have identified the needs of potential users," says project architect Brian George of Corgan. "But since we don't have a real budget we can't go very far with the design."

"The city has made a commitment to put money in the 2007 bond program," says council member Veletta Forsythe Lill, "and I expect the city will keep that promise to the small arts groups so that all three venues can open in 2009."

The glue that will hold these various architectural fragments together is the landscaping plan, which at the moment is sketchy at best. The French landscape architect Mr. Desvigne showed a few dreamy sketches in 2003 that had little connection to Texas or Dallas. He has shown nothing else publicly, though similar drawings are hanging in a landscape architecture exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, labeled "Greenwich Peninsula, London, England."

JJR and Dallas landscape consultant Kevin Sloan have joined the site development team, so this piece of the design puzzle should start to fall in place. But they have catching up to do.

When he started working on the Winspear Opera House two years ago, Mr. de Grey cautioned that if the planning "deals only with the immediate pieces of the center, it will fail. There has to be a strategy for the whole Arts District, and that can't come only from the architects. It requires a full-scale public debate."

That strategy is still emerging, and most of the debate has been in-house. The larger public discourse, including substantive conversations with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra that occupies the Meyerson, the Arts Magnet High School, Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe and other neighbors, has not really begun.

The arts magnet, with its 700 students and $40 million expansion in the works, is mostly in the dark.

'No dialogue'

"We've heard nothing about the site plan, the public spaces or what's happening with the buildings," says Nash Flores, chairman of the school's building campaign. "There's been no dialogue.'

Guadalupe Cathedral, which brings an estimated 12,000 worshippers into the Arts District every Sunday, is also out of the loop. "We've had one meeting three years ago," says Craig Melde, architect for the current cathedral restoration. "We would like to have had more."

Even the DSO, which will share a plaza with the opera house, has not been at the table, though its president, Fred Bronstein, says he's not especially concerned because of overlap in the organizations' boards.

"When we have finalized the program, we will talk to the neighbors," says Howard Rachofsky, the center's site committee chairman. "I'm always reluctant to put out a lot of stuff about designs that aren't final. People get ideas."

One of the ideas they might get is that, impressive as private support for it is, the center is also a major public project - built on public land, with public infrastructure and containing a publicly funded City Performance Hall. Those investments alone top $50 million, not counting the estimated $4 million to $5 million to operate and maintain the buildings in the future.

The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts will likely be the last major cultural institution in the Arts District, the last chance to complete a 30-year-old civic dream. And that will take as much collaboration as can be mustered.