| Go for the bold Opera/theater complex could bring Arts District to life 04/22/2001 By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts is the most ambitious project ever proposed for the Arts District and the one that could finally transform it from an expanse of blunted expectations into a focus of civic life.
The center would contain a 2,400-seat opera house, or lyric theater as it's being called, a separate 800-seat multiform theater and possibly one or two additional spaces for smaller music and dance groups. These buildings would be clustered on two blocks roughly bounded by Routh, Flora and Leonard streets and Ross Avenue. The opera house, which would also host ballets and musicals, appears destined for the corner of Routh and Ross, while the multiform theater would be located north of Flora, where the funky metal shed known as the Arts District Theater now stands.
There are still many hurdles to clear, including a capital campaign, a May 2002 bond election and an uncertain economy. Still, the Performing Arts Center represents an extraordinary opportunity for Dallas because of its size and its dramatic gateway location, and because at $250 million it would be the largest and probably the last major cultural monument built here for decades. If the curtain goes up in 2006 as planned, the Arts District, for better or worse, could be complete.
"Opera houses don't represent American architecture at its best," says New York architect Malcolm Holzman, designer of the Murchison Performing Arts Center at the University of North Texas in Denton. "You think first of Paris or Vienna, not New York and Washington. Dallas has a chance to set a new standard for this country."
For all of these reasons, the new center must be bold, memorable and emphatically of its own time. It must express the aspirations of the community, not just the wishes of the donors; engage its neighbors, not wall them off. Ideally, it would do for its city what the Sydney Opera House in Australia and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, have done for theirs – provide a cultural landmark that announces what Dallas is all about.
The only way to do this is to take a chance. Shoot the moon on a daring design and an adventurous architect.
This is not the Dallas way. For the most part, the city has taken the cautious middle road in civic architecture, choosing Edward Larrabee Barnes for the Dallas Museum of Art, for example, and I.M. Pei for the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. Both solid, impeccably credentialed architects who are invariably tasteful but not necessarily inspiring. The Arts District needs less good taste and more messy vitality.
Getting going
The long and tortuous architect selection process has just begun. The center's board has chosen an architectural adviser, Dean Roger Schluntz of the University of New Mexico School of Architecture, and put together committees for the opera house and the multiform theater, with a third committee to coordinate the entire process. Architects will be allowed to compete for one or both buildings, though the board seems to favor hiring a different architect for each building. It hopes to have a short list of finalists by fall and winners by early 2002.
Yet with so many people involved, and so much money at stake, the temptation to make a safe, consensus choice will be great. To many people, an opera house still means a stately classical building with white columns and bordello-red interiors – La Scala with parking. Dallas' opportunity lies in finding a design that is provocative, poetic and contemporary, that challenges conventions and opens up new performance possibilities. The old form-follows-function routine won't do. It's time to place a bet on the future.
"I want the process to be inclusive and to aspire to the very best," says board member and arts patron Deedie Rose. "I'd also like us to look beyond just those architects who've done an opera house or a performing arts center. But I'm not sure everyone is comfortable with that."
Possible futures
Picking architects is like picking stocks; past performance is no guarantee of future success. At the same time, being a good client means knowing not only who's available but what kind of architect you want to marry: minimalist, materialist, pragmatist, poet. The categories are slippery, but the issues are real.
Frank Gehry, for example, is a sculptor and a compulsive experimenter who pushes the limits of his art at every opportunity. History and precedent are secondary concerns, and context is whatever he says it is.
Mr. Gehry's forthcoming Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is an arabesque of swooping forms and unimaginable angles – architectural taffy – wrapped in gleaming stainless-steel panels. It is also a surround hall rather than a traditional shoebox, meaning that the stage sits in the center of the room and the audience on all sides. There are only a handful of such halls – Berlin being the most celebrated – because they make acousticians apoplectic. But Mr. Gehry covets their intimacy, and with his acoustician, Nagota Acoustics of Tokyo, is plunging ahead.
Having cast his lot with the Dallas Museum of Natural History, which is hunting for a new home in the Arts District, Mr. Gehry is probably out of the running for the Performing Arts Center. But there are other architects of similar sculptural inclinations, if not similar celebrity.
Christian de Portzamparc's City of Music in Paris, one of late President Francois Mitterrand's Grand Projets, is a collage of soaring walls and floating roofs that is part Le Corbusier and part Morris Lapidus. Yet his deft handling of light and color, coupled with the surprising intimacy of the individual performance spaces, erases any sense of chilly monumentality.
Santiago Calatrava is more the lyrical engineer-architect whose buildings and bridges, including those proposed for the Trinity River, combine structural bravura with the fluid, sensuous lines of plants, animals and the human body. His designs for the Tenerife (Spain) Opera House and the City of Arts and Science in Valencia, Spain, both on exhibit in the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University, are like dream works for a city of the future, with none of the iciness that such a phrase implies.
Sculptural bravura in the work of Antoine Predock is tempered by extreme sensitivity to place, whether a street, a city or a region. History and myth are his starting points, and appropriateness is as important as formal invention. The Nelson Fine Arts Center at Arizona State University in Tempe, for instance, is a contemporary abstraction of Southwestern vernacular architecture, its massive walls and blocky forms recalling Indian pueblos and ceremonial buildings. Visitors walk downstairs to an art museum, then upstairs to dance studios and a large proscenium theater, passing through shaded gardens and courtyards that are essential in the desert.
The Culture and Congress Centre in Lucerne, Switzerland, designed by Jean Nouvel, fuses rational modernism and romantic site planning. A dramatic cantilevered roof sails out toward the lake like the prow of a ship, while below, a soaring glass wall frames a lobby with grand staircases and a series of small wooden bridges that recall the medieval version nearby. The concert hall, with acoustics by the Meyerson's Russell Johnson, has received rave reviews, the adjacent art museum and convention theater less enthusiastic ones. But in its integration of inside and outside, place and performance, Lucerne is a stunning achievement.
Rafael Moneo's Kursaal Auditorium and Congress Center in San Sebastian, Spain, is as dynamic and welcoming as his Beck Building in Houston is stiff and standoffish. A pair of canted glass boxes facing the sea, the center seems more geological abstraction than building, as though a chunk of the nearby cliffs had broken off and landed on the beach. Inside the boxes are two large auditoriums connected by lobbies and grand staircases, all washed in natural light. In attitude, though not in form, Kursaal recalls Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House – a dramatic, modern building that makes everything around it better.
Cesar Pelli, whose firm prepared the Dallas center site plan, resides on the opposite end of the design spectrum from Mr. Gehry and Mr. de Portzamparc. He is cautious and pragmatic. Materials, colors and urban rehab are his game, not sculpture or spectacle. Among his current projects is the $250 million Performing Arts Center of Greater Miami, a combination concert hall, ballet theater and opera house that stretches across two city blocks with a boulevard in the middle. It's a tough site in a tough neighborhood, which Mr. Pelli is trying to stitch back together using everything from plazas and gardens to an observation deck atop an abandoned Sears building.
Only a handful of architects are capable of designing a major opera house, but an 800-seat theater is within the reach of many. Almost by definition it is a place for exploration and experimentation, and therefore immediately appealing to young Turks and up-and-comers looking for their big break.
The selection committee should seize the moment to throw a wide net that might snare an Enrique Norten, the Mexican minimalist with several impressive museums, in Socorro, N.M., and Philadelphia; or Phoenix architect Will Bruder, responsible for America's best new public library in his hometown; or Manfredi and Weiss and Diller + Scofidio, two cutting-edge husband-and-wife teams that have won prestigious design competitions – the latter for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art on April 10.
Dallas architects should get serious consideration for the theater, as well, not because they're local but because every city has a stake in nurturing its best talent. The lesson of Barcelona applies here. Although a few prestigious commissions for the 1992 Olympics went to international superstars – Arata Isozaki, Norman Foster, Richard Meier, Mr. Gehry – the bulk of the work – housing, bridges, parks, memorials – went to local architects who, for the first time, got to work at a civic scale. The superstars are gone, but Barcelona has an entire generation of talented and tested designers to carry on the work of city building.
Center and district
The estimated construction cost of all current and proposed projects in the Arts District (expansion of the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Performing Arts Center, Museum of Natural History) approaches $450 million, which is roughly twice the amount spent there in the preceding two decades. Yet no spate of spectacular new buildings will resuscitate the district unless the streets and public spaces around them are alive and attractive, as well.
The Dallas Museum of Art and the Meyerson are elegant bookends on a street where nothing happens. No sidewalk cafes, no shops, no vendors, no working artists, nothing to entice people to drop by on a balmy day just to see what's going on. The Arts District desperately needs all of these things – known generically as diversity – to complement the concerts, exhibitions and occasional special events. Yet the way things are going, there won't be any room for diversity. Virtually every square foot of ground between the DMA and the Arts Magnet High School is spoken for, and the one serious mixed-use project, for the corner of Flora and Pearl, hasn't got going.
Even if the Performing Arts Center turns out to be our Bilbao or Sydney Opera House, the Arts District will need an urban designer/planner to look after the public realm so that the pieces mesh and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The architects won't do this; they'll focus on what happens on their block. Someone has to represent the broader public interest and have as much clout as the architects, acousticians and theater consultants.
A 1998 feasibility study by Theatre Projects Consultants of Ridgefield, Conn., called for half a dozen venues plus a revamped Annette Strauss Artist Square with a 1,500-seat amphitheater. These spaces would serve both established organizations, such as the Dallas Opera and Dallas Theater Center, and small and emerging groups that are chronically homeless. The goal was to counter the arts palace syndrome by introducing a more intimate neighborhood scale that would attract different audiences and uses.
"If the Arts District doesn't have at least four or five pieces, it won't happen," chairman John Dayton said at the time.
Richard Pilbrow, who directed the feasibility study, believes the basic concept is still valid.
"There is clearly a need for smaller spaces," he says, "not just out in the community but in the Arts District as well. It should be a place that is open to everyone."
But this plan has been scaled back as too costly.
"We have to build something here that we can afford," says William Lively, president and CEO of the arts center foundation. "Instead of a village we might build fewer venues but establish an endowment and use the income to reduce fees elsewhere."
Mr. Lively acknowledges that this won't satisfy many small organizations, which feel that they have been shortchanged for years. He characterized their reaction to the endowment proposal as skeptical.
Public offering
There might be less skepticism if the entire process of choosing architects and designs were more public. In Europe, architecture is a spectator sport. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people show up for juries and lectures and civic design competitions to learn more about how cities get built.
Dallas could do the same thing. Instead of closed-door meetings followed by news conferences, the presentations for both the Performing Arts Center and the Arts Magnet High School could be made at City Hall or the Dallas Museum of Art. Ask the finalists to deliver a public lecture and then mount an exhibit of their plans and drawings before the winners are chosen, the way the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth did for its new building. While citizens won't get to vote, with so much public money involved, they ought to have a voice.
Architecture, the most public of the arts, remains a remote and abstract enterprise to most people, undeniably important yet also strangely disconnected from normal discourse. Here's a great chance to demystify the design process and expand the audience of informed consumers. These daring performing arts centers offer lessons for the one proposed in the Arts District:
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Los Angeles
Frank Gehry's go-for-broke design combines swirling forms with a sumptuous but acoustically risky auditorium.. Nelson
Fine Arts Center
Tempe, Ariz.
Antoine Predock reinterprets traditional Southwestern forms without campiness
or cheap sentimentality. Murchison Performing
Arts Center
Denton
Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates uses concrete and particleboard instead of marble and teak, but the result is surprisingly warm and engaging. Culture and Congress Centre
Lucerne, Switzerland
This intellectually rigorous building by Jean Nouvel romances its site with an operatic roof and rich interiors.City of Music
Paris
Monumental facades and quirky pop details wrap studios, recital halls and a series of intimate courtyards and gardens, by Christian de Portzamparc. Performing Arts Center of Greater Miami
Cesar Pelli uses plazas, gardens and outdoor restaurants to connect the pieces of a fragmented urban neighborhood.New Jersey Performing Arts Center
Newark
The design by Barton Myers engages the city with restaurants, community rooms and bright, spacious lobbies that declare it an important civic space, not a remote arts palace.
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