High-wire acts and heavy props, used to build the gravity-defying steel “bird cage” on concrete stilts that frames the tallest little theater in Texas, stole the show from myriad balancing acts that combined into a command performance at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts.

The “most challenging thing” about the 132-ft-tall Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre was the structure’s instability until it was complete, says Jeff Wagner, senior project manager in the Dallas office of McCarthy Building Cos.

The construction manager at-risk and concrete contractor knew that business as usual would not work for this reverse game of pick-up sticks. So it set aside its habit of hiring the lowest bidder and approached subcontractors it knew it could trust. McCarthy also hired a sequential construction engineer and gathered the structure’s heavy hitters, including the engineer of record, for 20-plus meetings over 21 months to choreograph the steel-and-concrete show. “Everyone put aside individual needs and worked at what was best for the project, which was not easy to do because of the risk involved,” Wagner says. “It was amazing to watch the formwork guys thinking about steel erection,” he adds. “At times, I thought we might be wasting time and money but the meetings paid off tenfold,” he says, adding that the 98%-complete job is on schedule to open in October and within budget, with only a $20,000 bankruptcy-related claim.

The 600-seat Wyly, to house classical and experimental theater and exhibitions, is part of the $354-million Dallas Center for the Performing Arts. DCPA also includes a 2,200-seat opera house, an outdoor performance venue, two underground parking garages and a 10-acre park. DCPA, which will give the complex to the city as a gift, declines to break down costs.

The unconventional frame, which rests on six perimeter columns and a perimeter shear wall, was born of a radical design by REX/OMA, Joshua Prince-Ramus (principal in charge) and Rem Koolhaas. Instead of a theater’s typical horizontal layout, with support spaces surrounding the auditorium and the stage fly sticking out like a sore thumb, the box’s contents are stacked and stuffed, like a club sandwich, above and below an at-grade performance chamber that fills the building’s 109 x 94-ft footprint. In another bold move, the architect made three of the chamber’s 27-ft-tall facade walls from clear glass, merging indoors and out. The giant picture window on the world has two operable glass doors that create a 20-ft-wide, 27-ft-tall opening to the plaza outside. The window, which has shades and blackout curtains, had to meet stringent acoustical standards. Above the window, the building is draped in vertical aluminum tubes, reminiscent of the corrugated-metal shed of Wyly’s predecessor, the Dallas Theater Center. The 90-ft-tall metal drape ends above the window wall, as if the curtain is going up for a performance.

The machine-like hall can be configured three ways: proscenium stage, thrust stage and flat floor. Two balconies move in and out or fly up­­, emptying the chamber. The lobby, backstage areas and mechanical rooms are in three concrete-framed basements. Everything else is above the chamber, except elevators, which climb outside the east wall of the box, and an extension for loading docks and set assembly (see cutaway, p. 36).

“The litmus test for Wyly was the ability to transform the theater into any of three performance configurations in eight hours, using two stagehands,” says Prince-Ramus, principal of REX Architecture P.C. (REX was known as OMA New York, equally owned by Prince-Ramus, as sole principal, and Koolhaas, founder of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, when DCPA engaged the design architect in 2003. In 2006, Koolhaas sold his interest, and OMA NY was renamed REX.)

Prince-Ramus says height was introduced to provide an icon. That was a challenge: The 80,000-sq-ft building is competing with the Dallas skyline and the much larger opera house. Stacking the building’s functions would also bring rehearsal and other support spaces into closer proximity and camouflage the stage’s fly tower. “Our fear of the stage tower was overcome by making the stage tower a building with other uses,” says Koolhaas.

The theater in a tall body shocked DCPA at first. But the green light came in June 2004, when the scheme was presented. The major donor, “Mr. Wyly, said, ‘Yes, I’ll put my name on it,’” says Michael Korns, DCPA’s theater project manager.

Intense teamwork was not limited to construction of the structure. “A lot of the job’s technical challenges were not just solved by the architect-engineering team but in a collaboration with the subs,” says Pat Ankney, principal in charge for the job’s architect of record, Kendall/Heaton Associates, Houston.

The rainscreen facade was designed with New York City-based Front Inc., which collaborated with DAMTSA, Buenos Aires, for engineering and fabrication. DAMTSA collaborated with A. Zahner Co., Oklahoma City, which installed the tubes.

DCPA’s project architect, Vincent Bandy, says many components were “almost design-build, despite having a complete set of construction documents.” The hoist for flying the balconies was adapted from scoreboard hoists. Telescoping drawbridges that connect balconies to elevators were adapted from slide-out drawers for fire trucks.

“The concepts existed early on,” says Bandy. “How to execute them was the difficult part.”

That goes double for the structure. The need was to provide a column-free chamber, a hollow box with no corner columns and as little perimeter structure as possible, says Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA), the Seattle-based structural engineer. The frame’s cage consists of a 34-ft-deep belt truss from levels 4 to 7, which takes gravity and lateral loads, and 22-ft-deep interior trusses spanning east-west from levels 5 to 7 (see drawing, opposite page). Levels 2 and 3 hang from levels 4 to 7. Levels 8 and above are supported by 4 to 7. On the east side, the structure bears on a 1-ft-thick concrete shear wall. Two concrete perimeter columns, 1.5 x 4 ft, stretch to level 9 or the roof on each of the other sides. Columns double as belt-truss webs. Corner cantilevers, as great as 44 ft, are formed by keeping columns away from corners. Four of the six gravity columns are battered to also resist lateral loads. Level 7 is the only complete floor above grade.

For help with sequential construction staging, McCarthy hired the Olympia office of TY Lin International, a structural engineer familiar with bridges, which are also often unstable until they are complete. TY Lin broke the work into 22 stages and analyzed each stage for stability. MKA reviewed each analysis to make sure construction loads imposed by temporary structures, including corner props, would not fail permanent members.

During preconstruction staging meetings, the group refined the plan a dozen times. For example, the team figured out how to make certain elements do double duty. Shoring towers that supported formwork were used for post-shoring battered columns. Post-shores were installed inside formwork so that when workers stripped forms, they were already in place. The team also increased the size of permanent steel members so they could double as tension or compression struts during column pours. Some of the embeds, supported offshoring towers, weighed 3.5 tons. Whenever a change was made to permanent members to take construction loads, MKA had to re-analyze the structure.

Ultimately, there were 225 shoring towers, each 8 ft square in plan and 90 ft tall, braced together into a 140-ft square. “It looked like a bamboo forest,” says McCarthy’s Wagner.

Column construction, which began in July 2007, was even more complicated because they were partially expressed as architecture. “It was extremely challenging because we couldn’t use cambering,” says Wagner. “And we were far above ground without anything to support to.”

Steel erection started in February 2008, once the columns were finished to level 8 and the concrete had cured. “Our biggest problem was that it was a cantilevered system with no [permanent] corner supports,” says Jimmy Kepple, vice president of operations for Bosworth Steel Erectors Inc., Dallas. “Everything below level 7 was a real challenge,” he adds.

“This is the kind of project that scares certain contractors,” says Jay A. Taylor, MKA’s principal in charge.

Kepple calls the frame a “belt and suspenders,” with the battered columns as the suspenders. “We needed the battered columns and the shear wall to hold up the main trusses, and we needed the belt truss, which ties into the columns, to keep the cage from splaying,” says the erector.

Bosworth had to complete levels 4 to 7, hang the structure to level 2 below it, wait for McCarthy to build the columns to the roof, and then erect structure to the roof. Crews had to lift trusses over the columns. Using two cranes, they erected the north and west belt trusses first, with 29-ft-long wide-flange beams hanging down from the ends. The WFs, which would remain as permanent framing, were connected to 28-ft-long corner props installed at level 1. Next, crews installed the two interior trusses. After that, crews erected the south and east belt trusses, with the remaining corner WF hanging down.

After completing the system’s horizontal trusses and interim steel, crews started erecting the hung steel for levels 2 and 3. “That was the toughest part,” says Kepple. “Building from the top down, we were defying gravity,” he adds. Cranes had to pick each member over the completed “tabletop” and feed it down through its center. “It was like threading the needle,” says Kepple.

In the original staged analysis, Bosworth had 170 days from start of erection to removal of temporary steel. But the start date got pushed out because concrete work took longer than first expected. Bosworth compressed the time for steel erection into 144 days. Kepple credits Sam Rojas, Bosworth’s senior superintendent, with the savings. “Sam inverted the drawings and traced down the main support members at level 5 that would be carrying level 2. After installing those members, he proceeded to ‘fish’ down level 2 and 3 pieces into position, working from the lowest level up to level 5. It was very efficient, with no wasted motion,” says Kepple.

The operation went “pretty well” thanks to the meticulous preconstruction planning, adds Tim Hunter, project manager with steel fabricator W&W Steel, Oklahoma City. Hunter calls W&W’s $5.5-million contract, for a total of 820 tons, “expensive” steel.

On July 8, after the frame was done and the concrete elements had cured, Bosworth removed the props. First, crews jacked the prop under the northwest corner, with the 44-ft cantilever, about 1⁄2 in. and removed shims. There was 7⁄16 in. of deflection, as calculated. Bosworth did the same at the other three corners. Kepple describes prop removal as a “nonevent.”

The structure’s builders may have stolen the show, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the theater troupe doesn’t deserve curtain calls. Of the many unusual parts, the facade—a 37,665-sq-ft aluminum drape—takes center stage. The system consists of 462 extruded tubes, 90 ft long and 3 in. to 10 in. in diameter, that hang like interconnected vertical blinds from a series of dead- load supports at the structure’s top. Tubes are supported every 11 ft along their length for wind loads. Each connection has an in-out adjustment to facilitate alignment. A slider system allows vertical movement. Most joints are hidden.

The biggest challenge was to keep the price down, which meant minimizing the material thickness and building up the larger tubes to avoid costly custom extrusions, says Dante A. Martinez, president of DAMTSA, which engineered and fabricated the system under a $3.2-million contract. The system uses only 140 tons of aluminum, he adds.

With tolerances of 1⁄32 in., the installation had to be on the money. In a process much like stringing beads, crews from A. Zahner Co., Kansas City, Mo., assembled each 20-ft-long tube section on site. The first piece was lifted by hand and strung on a crane cable. The crane then raised it, making space for the second piece, and so on. “I thought the process was nuts at first, but our guys proved it,” says Bill Zahner, CEO.

“I think there are a lot of things about this building that people are going to look at,” says John Coyne, director of design for the job’s Theatre Projects Consultants, Norwalk, Conn. “I think it’s beautiful.”

DCPA’s Korns is also happy with the novel high-rise theater. “Our program has been satisfied, and we got a great piece of architecture,” he says.