Located in fornt of Dallas Winpear Opera House, the Annette Strauss Artist Square was designed by Foster+Partners. As a public space, this new square dedicated to host popular events, music/dance concerts, and spotlighting the Dallas Symphony and Opera to a wider audience.
Construction is progressing well on the Winspear Opera House, the focal point for the new district. Organisationally, the Winspear reinvents the opera house for a new century, creating a transparent, publicly welcoming series of spaces that wrap around the rich red-stained drum of the 2,200-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, café and bookstore that will be open throughout the day. Entered beneath a deeply overhanging canopy, which shades the outdoor spaces from the harsh Texan sun, the transition from the 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’.
