The ordered array of LED lights and the angled faces of the panels came late in the game. 

In new stage for arts,design runs deep

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

By March of 2011, the overall form of the veil was set, but the lights were not yet in an ordered array. Several panel variations and the trapezoidal section were still to come.

Renderings by LMN Architects 

incident light

respond

How the Tobin Center was born

architecture

Air-handling unit semi-concealed (above) and presented like a precious object (below).

September 14, 2014 The final form of the Tobin Center’s most iconic feature,  the LED-studded “veil”  of custom-made painted aluminum  panels that sheaths the H-E-B Performance Hall, stands at the end of a long process of refinement.   The veil (as the architects call it) might more-aptly be called  a “mantilla.” The Tobin’s metal fabric has neither the  opacity of most traditional veils nor the transparency of Western bridal veils. Like a Spanish mantilla, it is  elaborately lacy and varied in texture, with transparent and opaque patches intermixed, and the sheer rise from which it descends  can be seen as analogous to the peineta, the tall  comb over which the mantilla drapes. The veil is most transparent where it ramps above the underlying structure’s rooflines. Above the tall stage house and the seating volume, the veil as seen from ground level reveals the sky beyond — it has been dubbed the AT&T Sky Wall. Above lower-level roof areas, the veil coyly half-reveals, half-obscures mechanical equipment, which adds its visual complexity to the complexity of the veil itself. This playfulness is one of the veil’s great delights. Seen from the west, an air-handling unit just peeks above the veil that semi-screens it. Seen from the west, across the river, this mundane equipment is presented almost like a precious object, cupped by a fold of the veil. Well, in San Antonio summers, an air handling unit is a precious object. Ask architect Erik Indvik to explain the development of the  veil, and he begins not with architecture, but with a sense of  place. He’s a principal with LMN Architects and project designer on the Tobin Center. “One of the things we had always been intrigued by [was] the  wonderful nature of what happens in San Antonio with the  festivals and the River Walk and the light — the way the light  dapples through during the day on the River Walk, and the  play with the sky, and then at night as it transforms with the  trees now holding the lights. It’s a magical and unique  experience, one of the iconic ideas of San Antonio.” The architects filed those impressions, gleaned from the cultural analysis that precedes design, for later reference. Something else that precedes design is the program — all the things the project has to do and contain. “The building is very driven by program,” Mr. Indvik continued. “There are very specific things that have to happen. The stage is a stage; you  don’t mess around with it. You can sculpt around it, but you can’t sculpt it. The room is driven by the relationship of the audience to the performance, the acoustics — all those things are very driven. There’s back-of-house things that are more malleable, but they are very driven by how you work in the back of the house. “The form and the mass began to develop with how to create the opportunity for a river relationship, and then to keep the iconic nature of the auditorium’s facade.” Often, in architecture, the quotidian is midwife to the divine. All the quotidian stuff required by the program makes modern performing arts facilities inherently lumpy. Given enough space and a construction budget big as Dallas, architects can conceal the lumps within a geometrically pure or voluptuously sculptural structure. But this site was tightly constrained, and the $144 million construction cost, though not picayune, was far from lavish for projects of this type.   The architects decided to let the new structure be what the program dictated, and then to sheath the whole shebang in a semi-transparent skin that would mediate between the building’s internal “pragmatics” and its role in the public realm — particularly, its relationships with the River Walk on one side and the remnant of the auditorium on the other. “We tried lots of different ways of making a form that  would work with this building. We came to the veil  because it could both be there and not be there in a  way,” Mr. Indvik said. It has been fascinating to observe the development of the veil from the first publicly available rendering of 2010. In that (frankly unpromising) version,  the individual panels and the gaps between them matched the scale and horizontal orientation of the auditorium facade’s limestone blocks. The veil was an undifferentiated net, and it left the top of the stage house exposed. It looked like Sunset Strip Modern, circa 1960.   Happily, that was only the starting point of a journey that did not conclude until after construction had begun. (As I noted in a previous post, much of the design work on the veil was possible only with the aid of parametric modeling on computers, the domain of the LMN Tech Studio, although the architects also made numerous full scale mock-ups.) The veil steadily gained nuance and rhythm. The veil panels were turned vertical, then reduced in size. The overall form changed to rise above the stage house, and the front was eventually lowered. Some panels sprouted fins. Inspired by the  lights on the River Walk, the architects inserted LED pucks in the veil — early renderings showed the lights scattered randomly, but they eventually became an ordered array. Richard Johnson, LMN’s lead architect for the building enclosure, explained: “The fins were developed because we wanted fine-scale moves as well as bigger-scale moves. We realized the fin was where we got the most out of the light. The fins got bigger because of that — they allow us to control the light.”       The fins were perforated to catch the sunlight and to diffuse the LED illumination. The perforations changed from circles to slanting ovals, like the perforations on the H-E-B Performance Hall’s balcony fronts.  The panels on the main mass were cut with diagonal slots — Mr. Indvik said the angle mimicked “a bird sitting on a wire,” perhaps by way of apology for the serrations intended to discourage real birds from perching on the panels. Down below, to discourage human climbers, the gaps were replaced by inset panels.  Crucially, late in the game the face panels changed from a  rectangular to a trapezoidal section, with alternating faces  angled in opposite directions (except for one installed out of  order) so that in nearly any light they differ in hue and luminance. (All the panels are coated in the same neutral but chameleonic shade of metallic paint.) Finally, some  inset panels were given a complex pattern of oval perforations that graduated in size — actually, two subtly different patterns, bringing the total of panel types to 18 or 20, by Mr. Johnson’s count. (The veil supposedly contains 18,955 individual panels in total. They were fabricated by Kovach Building Enclosures of Arizona.) Those perforation patterns were adapted at giant scale to  produce the supple drape-like pattern of frits on two glass walls of the studio theater’s entry pavilion. Angled ovals of graduating size appear once again in the fritted southwestern windows of the H-E-B Hall — larger at the bottom to screen rooftop electrical equipment, smaller as they rise to open a clear view of  downtown.   Casual visitors might not notice these relationships, but they’re there, and they help to bind the parts into a consistent whole. Mike Greenberg   

Whodunnit

An early rendering of the veil, from 2010, showed larger, horizontal panels, an undifferentiated texture and a squat rear end.

The Tobin Center’s remarkable skin How to weave a mantilla

The Tobin Center’s veil of painted aluminum panels hurls a bold, ziggurat-like form into the sky (left). A closer look reveals several panel designs, organized to create intricate variations in texture, rhythm and transparency (below).

Detail from floor plan shows how pragmatic “back-of-house” functions were shoehorned into the site.From LMN Architects ’s submittal to Historic and Design Reviiew Commission.