Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre : By REX/OMA

Dallas, Texas, United States
REX/OMA
Post By:Kitticoon Poopong

Photo © Courtesy of Timothy Hursley

Vertical Theatrics: The mechanistic tower of REX/OMA’s Wyly Theatre enhances the flexibility of the performance along with connection to the world outside 
With its rippling aluminum facade and crisp cubic form, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre is an edgy presence in Dallas’s refined brick-and-stone Arts District. Corners peel back to expose massive X braces; floors cantilever at gravity-defying angles. Instead of flowing out like a traditional theater, with the stage in the center and support spaces to the sides, the Wyly pushes up, nine stories, with the lobby in the basement, the stage on the street, and rehearsal studio, costume shop, offices, and classrooms snapped together above like a transformer. The “vertical city” meets the Texas prairie. 

Photo © Courtesy of Timothy Hursley

Photo © Courtesy of Timothy Hursley

A centerpiece of the $354 million AT&T Performing Arts Center, the Wyly is a surprisingly small building, barely 90,000 square feet. Across the street stand I.M. Pei’s swirling Meyerson Symphony Center and Foster + Partners’ Winspear Opera House, with its thrusting sunscreen and blood-red performance drum. Knowing that their building would be upstaged by its more flamboyant neighbors, Joshua Prince-Ramus and Rem Koolhaas opted to play to the office towers behind instead of the low-slung cultural buildings in front.

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

“Verticality helped us acquire an identity,” says Koolhaas. “The building belongs both to the cultural complex and to the rest of the city.”
The Wyly’s tubular aluminum skin, reminiscent of a pleated theater curtain, transforms it into a Minimalist sculpture on a low, grassy pedestal. But the rain-screen skin is only one part of the story. The architects set out to reinvent the contemporary theater by designing a performance machine. Equipped with an elaborate system of winches, pulleys, lifts, tracks, and catwalks, the structure can be reconfigured from a proscenium stage to thrust or flat floor in a matter of hours instead of days, dramatically reducing labor costs. While this is common in sports arenas and convention centers, the technology has never been used quite this way. Balconies fly up into the ceiling at the touch of a button; aisles can be rearranged between acts; the audience may sit on the floor at the beginning of a performance and on stage at the end.

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

“Going up allowed us to free the ground plane so that control of how the play is seen or changed passes to the director instead of the building,” explains Prince-Ramus.
Early reports have been enthusiastic. “Everything you’ve heard about the flexibility of the space is true,” wrote Dallas Morning News theater critic Lawson Taitte. “The machinery has worked beautifully.”
“It is exactly what we were hoping for,” adds Wyly artistic director Kevin Moriarty, “which is not to say that it will appeal to everyone or that it will work for any play. It was certainly not conceived as a home for 19th-century-style productions.”

Photo © Courtesy of Timothy Hursley

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

The only complaints so far have been butt-bruising seats, poor sight lines in parts of the balcony, and, more frequently, the building’s perverse Chutes and Ladders entrance. Instead of entering directly from the street, patrons must walk down a sloping concrete ramp to the lobby, then back up a narrow interior staircase to their seats. This sequence stemmed from the architects’ desire for a totally flexible performance space, which meant that the lobby had to go below. (An early scheme showed the glass walls wrapping the stage folded up like garage doors, allowing patrons to spill out onto the plaza at intermission.) “Their thinking was that five minutes of inconvenience in the lobby was worth two hours of excitement onstage,” says Kevin Moriarty. 

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Yet the ramp is steep, hard, and unwelcoming, and with cars entering and exiting, dangerous as well. It also makes a large curb cut on Flora Street, the district’s main drag, while eclipsing views of the Winspear and the Meyerson on the other side.
Once inside, however, patrons find a sophisticated high-tech space. No sofas, velvet drapes, and warm, soothing colors here—only mute concrete floors and walls; sleek, stainless-steel-paneled overhangs; and bare fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling like light sabers. This is tough, “take that’’ interior architecture, occasionally crude in its execution yet carried through with the consistency of a serious aesthetic rather than a glib decorator flourish.

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Photo © Courtesy of DHV--Acoustics Because the performance chamber has three walls of glass and an interior configuration in constant flux, the ceiling offered one of the few fixed surfaces that could be treated with acoustical material. Here, designers incorporated coffered sound reflectors into a technical grid.

And in spite of its aloof, self-absorbed attitude, the Wyly still manages to engage the city at several levels. When a performance ends and the curtains part, audiences get a framed view of the passing parade on Ross Avenue, a major gateway to the Arts District. Likewise, the black-box theater on the sixth floor offers a synoptic glimpse of the rest of the district, with the Winspear bracketed by the Meyerson and Allied Works’ new Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts [record, January 2010, page 100]—classical music, opera, and theater doing a line dance. And from the balcony of the 9th-floor rehearsal hall, trimmed out in green artifical-grass carpet and fiberglass trellises, visitors have a panoramic view of downtown Dallas, with the historic Guadalupe Cathedral in the foreground and the skeletons of spec office buildings off in the distance. Past, present, and future, art and commerce are compressed into a single image. 

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

With only two productions so far, one the opening gala, it is too early to say how the Wyly will ultimately perform. Kevin Moriarty predicts it will take five years to know what it can and cannot do. “We’re going to assault the building relentlessly to discover its limits,” he says. 

Photo © Courtesy of Timothy Hursley

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

It is clearly a director’s theater, a laboratory for the new and surprising, and it will certainly redefine what a night at the theater means for Dallas audiences. Like much of both architects’ work, it is provocative rather than pretty, a gutsy roll of the dice. In a 21st-century arts district, that’s a good role to play.

thrust floor plan--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA

proscenium floor plan--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA

flat floor plan--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA

eight floor plan--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA

concept diagram--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA

pivoting acoustic door design section--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA--Acoustics
One especially tricky portion of the facade was an area on the west elevation with two operable glass panels that pivot to create a 20-foot-wide, 27-foot-tall opening to the outside. Pneumatic gaskets, inflated by a compressor when the doors close, help mitigate exterior noise penetration.

axo--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA--Structure and Program
The 132-foot-tall tower rests on six perimeter concrete supercolumns, four of which incline dramatically, and a perimeter concrete shear wall. A belt truss, from levels 4 through 7, augmented by a series of smaller interior trusses, completes the building’s “composite global frame.” Many of the elements in this unconventional system perform dual duty. For example, the raked columns act as belt-truss webs. The result is a ground- floor performance space with no interior columns, 44-foot-deep corner cantilevers, and little perimeter structure, allowing the blurring of audience and stage, inside and out. Above the theater, programmatic elements are stacked like interlocking puzzle pieces. Only one floor, level 7, is continuous.

section perspective--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA--Structure and Program
The 132-foot-tall tower rests on six perimeter concrete supercolumns, four of which incline dramatically, and a perimeter concrete shear wall. A belt truss, from levels 4 through 7, augmented by a series of smaller interior trusses, completes the building’s “composite global frame.” Many of the elements in this unconventional system perform dual duty. For example, the raked columns act as belt-truss webs. The result is a ground- floor performance space with no interior columns, 44-foot-deep corner cantilevers, and little perimeter structure, allowing the blurring of audience and stage, inside and out. Above the theater, programmatic elements are stacked like interlocking puzzle pieces. Only one floor, level 7, is continuous.

section perspective--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA--Stage Configurations
The theater’s interior can be radically rearranged by a small crew of stagehands from a flat-floor room (slide 5) to a proscenium layout (slide 6) or a thrust-stage arrangement (slide 7) in just a few hours. Lifts, mechanisms, and storage chambers above and below the performance hall allow balconies to be moved in or out. Seating wagons can rotate and move up and down, to facilitate storage and theater reconfiguration. The flexibility should permit the director to decide how best to present a play, since the theater layout is not dictated by the architecture.

section perspective--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA--Stage Configurations
The theater’s interior can be radically rearranged by a small crew of stagehands from a flat-floor room (slide 5) to a proscenium layout (slide 6) or a thrust-stage arrangement (slide 7) in just a few hours. Lifts, mechanisms, and storage chambers above and below the performance hall allow balconies to be moved in or out. Seating wagons can rotate and move up and down, to facilitate storage and theater reconfiguration. The flexibility should permit the director to decide how best to present a play, since the theater layout is not dictated by the architecture.

section perspective--drawing Courtesy of REX/OMA--Stage Configurations
The theater’s interior can be radically rearranged by a small crew of stagehands from a flat-floor room (slide 5) to a proscenium layout (slide 6) or a thrust-stage arrangement (slide 7) in just a few hours. Lifts, mechanisms, and storage chambers above and below the performance hall allow balconies to be moved in or out. Seating wagons can rotate and move up and down, to facilitate storage and theater reconfiguration. The flexibility should permit the director to decide how best to present a play, since the theater layout is not dictated by the architecture.

The People Architect Design Architect: REX/OMA 160 Varick Street 10th Floor New York, New York 10013 (T) (646) 220-6557 (F) (646) 230-6558 Architect of Record: Kendall/Heaton Associates 3050 Post Oak Boulevard Houston, TX 77056 (T) (713) 877-1192  (F) (713) 877-1360 REX/OMA: Joshua Prince-Ramus (Partner in Charge) and Rem Koolhaas, with Erez Ella, Vincent Bandy, Vanessa Kassabian, Tim Archambault Kendall/Heaton Associates: Rex Wooldridge, Pat Ankney, Vincent Nguyen, James Benton Architect of record Kendall/Heaton Associates Interior designer: REX/OMA Engineers: Structural engineer of record: Magnusson Klemencic Associates MEP/FP design engineer: Transsolar Energietechnik MEP/FP engineer of record, building controls consultant, and security consultants: Cosentini Associates Consultants: Theater consultant: Theatre Projects Consultants Acoustical consultant: Dorsserblesgraaf ADA consultant: McGuire Associates Cost consultant: Donnell Consultants Curtain wall and exterior envelope consultant: Front Furniture consultant: Quinze & Milan Graphics/wayfinding consultant: 2X4 Life safety consultant: Pielow Fair Lighting consultant: Tillotson Design Associates Vertical transportation consultant: HKA Elevator Consulting General contractor: McCarthy Building Companies Photographer(s) Timothy Hursley,Iwan Baan CAD system, project management, or other software used: Too many to list

The Products Structural system Steel supplier: W&W Steel Steel erector: Bosworth Steel Erectors Concrete supplier: TXI Concrete Concrete finishing: CSA/Mobley Speed Exterior cladding Metal/glass curtainwall:  Extruded aluminum exterior tubes: TISI ESTRUCTURAS METALICAS Standing seam metal cladding: A.Zahner Company Architectural Metals Glazing system: Kawneer & custom products Glazing subcontractor: Oak Cliff Mirror & Glass Roofing Built-up roofing: Soprema—Sbs Modified Bitumen Waterproofing Membrane Subcontractor: Kpost Company Elastomeric: Tremco: TREMproof 250 GC---Cold Fluid Applied @ Outdoor Terraces Installer: Chamberlin Metal: Standing Seam Metal Roofing A.Zahner Company Architectural Metals Windows Aluminum: Kawneer & custom products Glazing subcontractor: Oak Cliff Mirror & Glass Glazing Glass: PPG-Solarban 60 Glass @ Theatre Level Doors Entrances: Special-Lite (Aluminum flush door—lobby entrance) Metal doors: Piper Weatherfold Company Fire-control doors, security grilles: McKeon Overhead Doors Special doors (sound control, X-ray, etc.): Modernfold Operable Partitions Iac—Industrial Acoustics Company Hardware Locksets/Hinges: IVES Closers: LCN Exit devices: Von Duprin Pulls: Trimco Interior finishes Cabinetwork and custom woodwork: Woodhaus      Paints and stains: Pittsburgh Paints Special surfacing Floor and wall tile (cite where used):    Daltile: D617 Arctic White (Restrooms) Carpet: Tretford Raised flooring: Tate Access Flooring Furnishings Theater chairs: Moroso Lighting Interior ambient lighting: Custom Metal Craft (Custom Metal Craft did all of the custom light fixtures) Bartco Lighting Downlights: BK Lighting Lucifer Lighting Company Exterior: Designplan Lighting We-Ef Lighting Usa BEGA Lighting Controls:  Strand Lighting Conveyance Elevators/Escalators: Mid-American Elevator Company Accessibility provision (lifts, ramping, etc.): Garaventa Lift Plumbing Kohler

Related articles

• Dallas Arts District (gallucci.net)
• rem koolhaas to receive golden lion for lifetime achievement (designboom.com)
• Seattle Central Library / OMA + LMN | ArchDaily (archdaily.com)
• Billionaire Brothers Samuel and Charles Wyly Charged With $550 Million Fraud (dailyfinance.com)
• Architect Rem Koolhaas sets his sights on the East (cnn.com)
• Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre / REX | OMA (archdaily.com)
• Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre / REX | OMA (archrecord.construction.com)