With new opera house, Dallas does what Atlanta hopes to

The Dallas Symphony’s 20-year-old Meyerson Symphony Center, designed by acclaimed architect I.M. Pei, is one of the best concert halls in the world. The Winspear, which opened Oct. 23, is its equal for opera.

Designed by Spencer de Grey, from London’s Foster + Partners firm of “star-chitects,” the opera house is a modernist temple from the outside: gigantic in scale, of aluminum and glass with the lobby’s neon red shining into the night like a beacon. Inside it’s traditional, in a cozy European “horseshoe” shape with four balconies, clear acoustics and great sightlines.

After the opening performance of Verdi’s “Otello,” I’d easily call it one of the most satisfying opera houses in America.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra plays in an acoustically dismal venue. The Atlanta Opera rents space in a pleasant, albeit multipurpose, theater.

Fortunately, we can thank our civic leaders for perky motivational slogans. Here’s one that makes a mockery of Atlanta’s ambitions: “Every Day is an Opening Day.”

A Texan might call that statement “all hat and no cattle.”

Dallas’ Winspear Opera House is part of the new, still under-construction, $354 million AT&T Performing Arts Center that includes the just-opened Wyly Theatre — in an eye-catching vertical design by another celebrity architect, Rem Koolhaus — plus a 3,000-seat outdoor theater called the Annette Strauss Artist Square, the smaller City Performance Hall and manicured green space.

Within that $354 million budget, the 2,200-seat opera house cost about $180 million, or $82,000 per seat, which seems like a good value for an excellent venue. The Winspear family gave the initial $45 million for the opera house. More than 90 percent of the money was raised from private, corporate and foundation sources.

The Atlanta Symphony’s hoped-for Symphony Center, as designed by Santiago Calatrava on 14th Street in Midtown, would have cost $300 million for 2,000 seats, or $150,000 each. And in contrast to Dallas, the ASO’s old fund-raising model required a third of the total for a new hall to come from government sources.

The Woodruff Arts Center’s latest master plan, announced in June, calls for a concert hall to be built on the main campus along Peachtree Street. Given the current economy, Woodruff leaders have not yet announced a fund-raising strategy or start date. “The new master plan is a road map, not a timetable,” says arts center CEO Joe Bankoff.

While other cities were successfully navigating the economic peaks and troughs of the 1990s and early 2000s to build performing-arts infrastructure — from Dallas and Seattle to Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Nashville — Atlanta, with its booming population, flamboyant billionaires and Fortune 500 companies, couldn’t get its collective act together for halls built specifically for concert and opera. (The Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center and Verizon Wireless Amphitheater at Encore Park are both fine spaces that opened in recent years; both serve many artistic masters.)

In Dallas, the new AT&T center is not a big building with multiple venues inside but a group of stand-alone buildings that have each been added to the Dallas arts district. The district is already home to the Meyerson concert hall, the Dallas Museum of Art, a sculpture garden, Asian art museum, performing-arts high school, a 1902 Catholic cathedral and other, smaller institutions. Plans for the district include high-end retail, restaurants and — this is key — dense urban population. For now, the arts district is an oasis surrounded by highways on three sides and the skyscrapers of downtown on the fourth.

Like ambitions for Midtown Atlanta, hoped-for residential development is an engine driving the Dallas arts district. “We’ve seen all over the world how cultural centers help regenerate a city,” says architect de Grey, referring to how Dallas, like many American cities, lost population to the suburbs starting in the 1960s. The trend in Dallas, like Atlanta, is slowly reversing.

City leaders feel certain “that, in time, this area will become heavily residential,” the English architect continues. “But these things don’t happen overnight. Neighborhoods around London’s South Bank [arts center] and New York’s Lincoln Center took 20 years before they were upscale and densely populated.”

All solutions are site-specific, he points out, adding, “I think with this concentration of arts buildings you’ll see Dallas revive and thrive” — words that should resonate in Atlanta as we contemplate another decade or more without adequate performing-arts infrastructure.

Pierre Ruhe blogs about classical music at ArtsCriticATL.com.