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Architecture review: Tobin Center for the Performing Arts

In new downtown stage for the arts, design that runs deep

What’s where at the Tobin: Interactive map with photos

Arc of upper lobby overhangs main lobby (above). Founders Lounge (left) is tucked above old foyer. Tall windows bathe upper lobby and compound-curved inner wall in natural light (below).

How the Tobin Center was born

Veiled front of new H-E-B Performance Hall defers to Municipal Auditorium facade but still asserts itself.

September 14, 2014 The American artist Jasper Johns described his creative process thus: “It’s simple. You just take something, and then you do something to it. Then you do something else to it. And something else. Keep this up and pretty soon you've got something.” The Tobin Center for the Performing Arts is quite something. Leading the design team was LMN Architects of Seattle, in association with Marmon Mok Architecture of San Antonio. Akustiks of South Norwalk, Conn., was the acoustical consultant. The theater consultant was Fisher Dachs Associates of New York. (For full design credits, see    The project is worthy of note on many grounds — as San Antonio’s first large-scale facility designed from the inside out with the needs of the performing arts in mind, as a thoughtful dialog between traditional and modern architectural vocabularies, as a grand addition to public space along the River Walk, as a bold presence in its downtown neighborhood, as an expression of the city’s sense of place, without resort to clichés. Most remarkable is the design intensity, the iterative  process described by Jasper Johns, that underlies much of the Tobin Center’s public face, both inside and out. It’s most  visible in the “veil” that drapes down from a summit nearly 120 feet above the street and enfolds much of the structure. A shimmering Gibraltar by day, a shower of multihued light in the evening, the veil makes the Tobin Center an instant icon of San Antonio architecture. But the veil does more than hurl a striking form onto the skyline. What makes it a great work of architecture is the intricacy of its variations in texture, rhythm and transparency, a product of design that runs deep. But attention to detail and thematic continuity pervade  the project.  Other major performing art facilities may be  more opulent in their finishes or more sculptural in form;  some possess virtues that the Tobin Center cannot match;  but none, in my experience, surpass  the “good enough isn’t  good enough” ethic that the Tobin Center’s architecture  represents, and that animates all the arts at their highest  level of achievement. First, let’s get the lay of the land. The Tobin Center’s site was formerly occupied by Municipal Auditorium, a cavernous 5,000-seat hall built in 1926 as a World War I memorial and largely rebuilt after a calamitous fire in 1979.  The auditorium addressed the downtown core to the south with a high, wide and handsome Spanish Colonial Revival facade, but it turned an unsightly back to the San Antonio River, then regarded as little more than a drainage culvert.   The stage house and seating bowl of the auditorium were razed, leaving intact the grand front facade, the narrow lobby and other public areas just behind it, and the arcades that once flanked the  seating bowl. The hollowed-out space was just large enough to accommodate the new 1,759-seat (more or less) H-E-B Performance Hall and the 230-seat (more or less) Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater. The new stage house and back-of-house areas of thelarger theater spill beyond the footprint of the auditorium on the northeast. The northwest corner of the site — an area once used for auditorium loading, staff parking and garbage bins — now is home to an outdoor venue that can seat 600, an entry from the River Walk, and a series of obelisks in homage to local Medal of Honor awardees.   Despite the inviting new address to the River Walk, most visitors to the Tobin Center are likely to enter through the familiar Municipal Auditorium facade, its architectural features now showcased by superb  lighting. New glass walls and doors have been placed just behind the tall front arches to create additional climate-controlled lobby space without compromising the historic look, and the wood front doors of yore have been removed, opening views to and from the lobby.   By setting the H-E-B Performance Hall at an angle relative to the front  facade, the architects were able to gain considerable lobby space. The front edge of the upper lobby is a sweeping arc that nearly meets the auditorium remnant on the east but pulls farther away on the west. Suspended in this six-story void is a random scattering of little spherical glass lamps, which might allude to the lights hung in the trees along the River Walk during the holiday season.  The asymmetry, dynamism and pristine whiteness of these modern lobbies contrast smartly with the classicism of the facade. Stair and balcony railings throughout the lobby areas are clear glass, pulling even remnants of the 1926 auditorium into the present and making the spaces seem open even where they are necessarily constricted. Two bridges cross the lobby to connect the theater’s box tier with the Founders Lounge, set just above the original foyer. The lounge’s LED ceiling lighting, variable in color, somewhat suggests an upscale disco.   The most intriguing architectural feature of the  lobby is a compound-curved wall of large  interlocking glass fiber reinforced gypsum “tiles.”   This gesture, bellying outward as it rises, carries through to the upper lobby, where it is bathed in natural light passing through tall, narrow windows just inside the veil.   

New glass wall and doors just inside Municipal Auditorium’s front columns extend climate-controlled lobby space.

Front facade (Municipal Auditorium)

(See “How to weave a mantilla.”)

Part of Municipal Auditorium’s 1926 arcade is seen through fritted glass wall of Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater’s entry pavilion

Continued on page 2

How to weave a mantilla

Detail from the veil shows intricate weave of panel variations, fins, slits, insets, alternately angled faces

Just photos

Main lobbies

Preserved portions of Municipal Auditorium interior were freshened with glass railings, discreet lighting.

Light-studded veil of H-E-B Performance Hall rises behind  Spanish Colonial Revival facade of Municipal Auditorium. Below, shimmering veil is backdrop to outdoor venue with giant video screen. Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater’s entry pavilion stands at right. Extension of Municipal Auditorium’s limestone facade, pushing through glazed walls, reads as a Modernist gesture. All photos by Mike Greenberg

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The veil

“Whodunnit.”)