Winspear Opera House

One of five venues that comprise the new Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House will be home to The Dallas Opera, Texas Ballet Theater, touring Broadway productions and numerous other performances. In a radically reconsidered approach to the traditional opera experience, the new opera house will continue to show internationally renowned performances of excellence and innovation. The design addresses the questions: What is the nature of the opera house in the twenty-first century; and how can we create a building that offers a model for the future?

The design of the opera house follows on from the practices formulation of a masterplan for the Performing Arts District, which will eventually contain buildings by other Pritzker Prize winners: Rem Koolhaas, IM Pei and Renzo Piano. Designed to ensure accessibility and legibility within a pedestrian-friendly environment, these new buildings will relate to one another along the green spine of Flora Street. The Winspear Opera House faces the Grand Plaza and the Annette Strauss Artists Square performing space and will provide a focal point for the entire district.

Organisationally, the Winspear reinvents the conventional typology of the opera house, inverting its closed, hierarchical form to create a transparent, publicly welcoming series of spaces, which wrap around the rich red-stained drum of the 2,000-seat auditorium. The ambition is to create a building that will not only be fully integrated with the cultural life of Dallas, but will become a destination in its own right for the non-opera going public, with a restaurant, caf and bookstore that will be publicly accessible throughout the day. In elevation the building is transparent, its curved glass walls revealing views of the public concourse, upper-level foyers and grand staircase. Entered beneath a broad overhanging roof, which shades the outdoor spaces from the harsh Texan sun, the transition from the Grand Plaza, through the foyer, into the auditorium is designed to heighten the drama of attending a performance in effect, to take the theatre to the audience.

Client: Dallas Center for the Performing Arts Foundation
Consultants: Buro Happold/Thornton-Tomasetti Engineers, Donnell Consultants Incorporated (DCI), Battle McCarthy, Michael Desvigne, Sand Space Design, Theatre Projects