Strangers in Dallas' arts scene

DALLAS — This city's three-decade effort to create an arts district has been hard fought by any definition of the term. It began in 1977, when Kevin Lynch, the noted planner and writer on cities, helped pick out a site just northeast of the downtown core, hard up against a partially sunken freeway, for a linked collection of museums, concert halls and public parkland.

Over the intervening years the 68-acre area has been built out in consistently ambitious but decidedly piecemeal fashion, with an arts museum (designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes) and symphony hall (I.M. Pei) arriving in the 1980s, a sculpture park (Renzo Piano) in 2003 and an expanded arts high school (Brad Cloepfil) last year.

That long history of fits and starts may explain why the newest member of the district -- the $354-million AT&T Performing Arts Center, which is made up of a new opera house, a theater and a park, with a third auditorium and an outdoor performance space yet to be built -- feels stuck in something of a time warp.

It's not the architecture of the two newly completed buildings, which will open officially Monday, that is really to blame. Both the Winspear Opera House, by the prolific London-based Foster + Partners, and the Wyly Theatre, by Joshua Prince-Ramus, of the New York firm REX, and Rem Koolhaas, his former boss and partner in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, are marked by sharply contemporary forms and stuffed with cutting-edge production technology.

The Wyly, a tall box of a building wrapped in a skin of aluminum tubes, is standoffish outside and yoga-flexible within; in classic Koolhaas form, the 600-seat theater dares the Dallas arts establishment to complain about its severe, basement-level concrete lobby, the almost punitively narrow main staircase and a terrace lined with bright-green fake grass. The 2,200-seat Winspear, which sits beneath a giant canopy designed to shade its generous plaza, is smoother and more congenial -- comfortably plush where it is not edged in deep red, hard-candy gloss.

What feels dated here, instead, is the district's organizing principle -- the idea that grouping together institutions for the arts, and recruiting an all-star team of leading architects to design them, remains a viable means of coaxing underdeveloped urban neighborhoods to life. It is the same logic that produced Lincoln Center in New York and, of course, the Music Center atop Bunker Hill, but here, in this latest phase of the Dallas project, it has been souped up for the age of celebrity architecture.