Word: winspear
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...Dallas celebrated the opening of two of the final big pieces of the puzzle. One of them, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, is the product of a collaboration between the Dutch architect-polemicist Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of REX Architects. The other, the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, is from the mighty office of the British architect Lord Norman Foster. The buildings are so unlike each other they're barely on speaking terms, but in their different ways, they both answer what the city has been looking for. (See pictures of Dallas' new performing-arts center...
...disguise. Instead of producing an instant suite of palazzi frozen in their moment, which is a fair description of New York City's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Dallas put together a diverse sampling of work by leading architects from across three decades. And with the Wyly and Winspear, very diverse. It would be hard to imagine two architects more unlike each other than Foster, the meticulous inheritor of the principles of High Modernism, and Koolhaas, who has spent a lifetime sorting through those principles to see which ones had to go. Foster's buildings tend toward the serene...
...goes without saying that they've never been known as fans of each other's work. During the more than five years it took to bring the Wyly and Winspear from the design phase to completion, representatives of the two firms rarely showed up in Dallas at the same time, preferring arm's-length communication by e-mail and conference calls. Stories about the exasperation of the Dallas powers-that-be started turning up in the local press. As a further twist, three years ago the Wyly's co-designer, Prince-Ramus, who headed the New York branch of Koolhaas...
...stroll from the Wyly to the Winspear Opera House just across from it is to go from the raw to the cooked. The Wyly is a box full of ideas about ways to organize the theatergoing experience, but it has a deliberately rawboned feel, with few concessions to anybody's ideas of elegance, no grand limestone swoops like the one Pei provided for the lobby of his symphony hall nearby. Foster and his head of design, Spencer de Grey, weren't interested in rethinking the opera house from the ground up. What they did instead was briskly update...
...Winspear consists of three main elements that radiate outward. At its center is the performance hall, a 2,200-seat, horseshoe-shaped venue with a stage deep enough to accommodate elaborate scenery and traveling Broadway musicals, the kind of stage Dallas has never had. From the outside the performance hall appears as a tall crimson oblong, like a bright red hatbox. That oblong is contained within a wraparound glass-walled lobby with a sweeping interior staircase that snakes upward along the curving red walls. The glass box is in turn surrounded on all sides by a massive steel canopy supported...