The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, a new multi-venue center for music, opera, theater, and dance, will open this month, completing the 25-year vision of the Dallas Arts District. Foster + Partners, Rem Koolhaas, Joshua Prince-Ramus, and Skidmore Owings & Merrill are among the architecture firms involved in the development, which includes four venues unified by a 10-acre park.
Wyly Theatre (above), designed by Prince-Ramus and Koolhaas, rethinks the traditional form of theater, placing support spaces either above or below the auditorium, enabling maximum interaction and flexibility of performance space and seating. The facility's mechanized “superfly” system can pull up both scenery and seating, allowing directors to rapidly change the venue to a wide array of configurations.
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| Aug 11, 2010
Platinum Award: Reviving Oakland's Uptown Showstopper
The story of the Fox Oakland Theater is like that of so many movie palaces of the early 20th century. Built in 1928 based on a Middle Eastern-influenced design by architect Charles Peter Weeks and engineer William Peyton Day, the 3,400-seat cinema flourished until the mid-1960s, when the trend toward smaller multiplex theaters took its toll on the Fox Oakland.