Entertainment

The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts has landed its third-largest contribution and a new, improved design for outdoor spaces around the Winspear Opera House and Wyly Theatre, now under construction.

Thanks to a $15 million gift from Sammons Enterprises Inc., the 10-acre park in the downtown Arts District will be named the Elaine D. and Charles A. Sammons Park.

"It names the center's destination park for a longtime distinguished family of Dallas," said Bill Lively, president and CEO of the performing arts center. "Mr. Sammons loved downtown, and Mrs. Sammons loves parks. That was a nice coincidence, and we were delighted to find that out."

Courtesy of Luxigon

A rendering of the 10-acre outdoor Performance Park, now named the Elaine D. and Charles A. Sammons Park

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In response to criticism of initial designs for the park, French landscape architect Michel Desvigne and the Chicago firm JJR have produced a simpler, calmer plan that is more coherent and will compete less with the adjacent buildings, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects.

Scheduled to open in fall 2009, the center's Winspear was designed by Foster + Partners, the Wyly by REX/OMA (Joshua Prince-Ramus and Rem Koolhaas). The adjacent 19-year-old Meyerson Symphony Center was designed by I.M. Pei.

The two largest gifts to the performing arts center came earlier in the fundraising campaign: $42 million from Margot and the late Bill Winspear for the opera house and $20 million from Dee and Charles Wyly and Cheryl and Sam Wyly for the theater. To date, the campaign has raised more than $325 million toward a goal of $338 million.

"To get a gift of this significance at this point in the campaign is really remarkable," Mr. Lively said. "It gives us the incentive and momentum to push to the end."

Founded by Mr. Sammons in 1962, Sammons Enterprises evolved out of a stock-life insurance company. At one point, Sammons Enterprises included everything from financial-services companies to hotel properties to bottled water, and it was one of the first investors in cable television.

Today, Sammons Enterprises is a diversified holding company that employs more than 4,300 in the United States, Mexico and the United Kingdom. One of the largest privately held companies in Dallas, the firm has operations including insurance and construction-equipment companies and the Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa in Asheville, N.C.

Since Mr. Sammons' death in 1988, his wife, Elaine, has been chairwoman of the company and a philanthropist and arts patron. A contribution from the couple helped establish Dallas' Sammons Center for the Arts, which provides permanent office and rehearsal spaces for 12 performing arts organizations and is used by more than 40 groups for performances, rehearsals and meetings.

"Sammons Park will be a refreshing venue for all the people of Dallas – those attending the symphony, opera or theater, as well as families and those who work and live downtown," said Sammons Enterprises CEO Robert Korba. "It will host cultural events, outdoor art exhibits and outdoor performances."

The previous design, unveiled in September 2006, drew a dismissive review from longtime Dallas Morning News architecture critic David Dillon, who described what was then called Performance Park as "a potpourri of discrete elements in search of a larger idea."

"Performance Park turns [out] to be more miniature golf course than grand civic space, with water hazards, tiny fairways, everything except the flags for pin placement. ...

"The park is overwrought and unresolved, with no clear center, no hierarchy or crisp spatial definition."

Stung, the performing arts center and its landscape designers regrouped and assembled a peer-review panel including Frederick Steiner, dean of the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, and Dr. Dillon, who by then had left the staff of The News.

"We as a group, with our clients, revisited the design," said Debra Mitchell, senior vice president of JJR, the site architect of record. "We undertook a number of things that I would say calmed the design.

"With two such prestigious buildings, it needed to be very calming and simple and not detract from their magnificence."

Gone are the earlier design's fussy groupings, clearly conceived as naming opportunities, in favor of more open spaces with fewer trees and water features.

The plan creates a clear axis between the Wyly and Winspear and punctuates lawns among paved walkways with crisp patches of native grasses and perennial flowers. The only water feature is a rectangular fountain, to the right of the opera house entrance.

The plan envisions the aluminum-fin canopy extending well beyond the opera house, shading movable tables and chairs. It also calls for free wireless access throughout the park.

In the middle of the long, wide slope into the underground entrance to the Wyly will be a zigzag, handicapped-accessible ramp, its switchbacks interspersed with more native plantings.

The park is expected to be completed by October 2009, when the opera house, theater and the outdoor Annette Strauss Artist Square open. A lineup of opening events will be announced soon.

"What we have envisioned all along is that this be a very democratic space," Ms. Mitchell said of the overall plan. "It should feel welcoming to anybody. If I were coming in from a suburban location to downtown with my family, I should feel free to walk down the street, enter the plaza, buy a newspaper and enjoy it.

"We want this to be not only a big, splashy, premier performance place, but a space that is well used by Dallas citizens around the year."

Designs for the Annette Strauss square are being reworked in response to noise concerns from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which performs and has offices in the Meyerson Symphony Center. The performing arts center design calls for moving the outdoor performance space behind the Meyerson, with its stage backed up against the northwest corner of the opera house.

And still to come from the city of Dallas are plans for the large urban park envisioned for a deck covering a two-block stretch of Woodall Rodgers Freeway northwest of the center.