McCarthy Completes Intricate, Concrete-Designed Dallas City Performance Hall

Oct. 25, 2012 - PRLog -- McCarthy Building Companies, Inc., a Texas builder for 33 years, recently completed the Dallas City Performance Hall, a 124,000-square-foot multi-phase theatre facility. Kicked off by a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday, Sept. 13 to celebrate the official opening, theatre attendees will enjoy a new state-of-the-art theatre that will be home for small and medium arts groups reflecting the diverse communities of Dallas. The City Performance Hall is McCarthy’s third project in the Dallas Arts District and is on track to be the first LEED Silver-rated performing arts facility in Texas under the United States Green Building Council.

“McCarthy enjoyed working on this particular project due to the exciting design and materials used to build the structure,” said McCarthy’s Texas Division President, Mike McWay. “McCarthy has significant experience building performing arts and entertainment venues. We are elated we could be a part of the team that is bringing yet another world-class theatre to the Dallas Arts District.”

The City Performance Hall boasts a 750-seat theatre, a grand lobby, event room and back of house facilities which include an enclosed garden and educational and meeting spaces. The green room area for performers will have two star dressing areas and the private meditation garden will be located just outside to help prepare for performances. A future Phase Two of the project is designed to include two flexible 200-seat theatres, an art gallery, a café and a bookshop.

Using concrete as the primary construction material allows for a wealth of design options as it can be formed into different shapes as well as painted and stained. In this instance, the structure is composed of a long sweeping roof flanked by two stories of cast-in-place concrete walls, and it is organized as a series of linear pavilions, capped by varying ribbon like roof forms. The interior audience chamber of the building includes articulated board form concrete walls creating an intricate and beautiful, horizontal wood grain design covering each wall in its entirety.The dense concrete walls create a solid sound barrier to hold in entertainment music and dialogue, and keep distracting noises out.

Additional unique features of the building include a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows in the main lobby offering a spectacular view of the Arts District and a LED light curtain in the primary performance area.

The architect of record for this project is Corgan Associates, Inc. of Dallas and the design firm is Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP (SOM) of Chicago. For more information on the City Performance Hall please click here.

In addition to the City Performance Hall, some of McCarthy’s notable performing arts projects include the AT&T Performing Arts Center Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, a unique 80,300-square-foot multi-form theatre facility in the Dallas Arts District; the Hollywood & Highland entertainment complex including the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California, a $312 million, 833,109-square-foot, mixed-use facility known as home to the Academy Awards; and the University of California Davis Robert & Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis, California, a $51.5 million, 106,000-square-foot, multi-level, 1,800-seat main performance hall with a 25-seat studio theatre.

About McCarthy

Celebrating 33 years of building in Texas, McCarthy is the nation’s eighth largest domestic general contractor (Engineering News-Record, May 2012) and a leading federal builder. An employee-owned company, McCarthy performs general contractor, construction management and design/build services for the following project types: entertainment , water/wastewater, federal, port/marine, healthcare, educational, parking structures, office buildings, bridges and highways, laboratory, biotechnology, retail, microelectronic, industrial facilities, tenant interiors and mixed-use project construction. In addition to Dallas, McCarthy has offices in Houston; Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego and Newport Beach, Calif.; Phoenix; Las Vegas; St. Louis; New Mexico; Collinsville Ill. and Atlanta. For more information please visit www.mccarthy.com.