True to the overused—but not inaccurate—phrase that describes the magnitude and breadth of everything in Texas (hats, hair, sky, etc.), arts and cultural institutions enjoy an outsize presence in the state’s most populous city, the intensely sprawling and diverse Houston.
The city’s de facto epicenter for the performing arts can be found in the Theater District, an appropriately plus-sized stretch of downtown populated by an assemblage of architecturally disparate venues. They include Ulrich Franzen’s Brutalist Alley Theatre (1968), home to Houston’s oldest professional theater company; the glassy Hobby Center for the Performing Arts (2002), designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects; Caudill Rowlett Scott’s white-marble-clad New Formalist masterwork Jones Hall (1966), erected for the Houston Symphony Orchestra; and the imposing redbrick Wortham Theater Center (1987), designed by Eugene Aubry and cohabited by the Houston Ballet and Houston Grand Opera. With its debut in September, the new Lynn Wyatt Square for the Performing Arts serves as the new al fresco anchor for these high-profile institutions—an inclusive green space that brings music, theater, and dance outdoors, liberated from darkened auditoria and thrust into the public realm.
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