Construction Progress + Continuation of the Master Plan
The new Music Building and Performance Hall is bringing the next phase of the Athenaeum cultural master plan to life.
As Phase 2 of the district, the building continues the broader vision established by the Crow Museum - connecting architecture, landscape, and campus life through transparency, proximity, and elevated floating forms that link the project to the future Arts Plaza and the wider UT Dallas campus.
The close relationship between the Music Building and Crow Museum is intentional, creating dynamic spaces between the buildings where galleries, rehearsal rooms, lobby spaces, and outdoor gathering areas remain visually connected.
The floating bar form houses the two large rehearsal rooms, a percussion studio and study lounge. It is supported by massive cast-in-place concrete V-columns that slope in two directions, creating covered exterior and lobby spaces below. Music rooms and study spaces above are framed by expansive glass openings that look towards the museum, plaza, and future Phase 3 museum.
Within the Performance Hall, a complex web of structural steel creates the framework that forms the clear span and volume required for its spatial design and acoustically engineered liner.
Wrapped in white patterned / sandblasted architectural precast concrete panels that are oriented vertically, the façade creates an extension of the cultural district identity.
The master plan is emerging as a new cultural gateway for UT Dallas.
#utdallas #utdbass #athenaeum #morphosisarchitects #concerthall
The future home of music at UT Dallas is taking shape.
Phase 2 of the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum brings a new Music Building and 680-seat Performance Hall to the growing cultural heart of campus. This project began with a powerful idea, that the spaces between the buildings should be just as important as the spaces inside them: places that encourage connection, creativity, performance, and musical education.
The Athenaeum master plan was shaped through open space, movement, and connection - creating plazas, shaded walkways, and gathering places that link back to the larger campus and invite students, faculty, and the public into a new shared cultural district.
At the same time, the building itself was designed from the inside out - shaped by the needs of music, performance, teaching, rehearsal and student life. It was conceived as a complete home for music, with teaching classrooms, two large rehearsal rooms, a percussion studio, individual practice rooms, administrative offices, student study lounges, and a world-class performance hall.
Exterior terraces and covered gathering spaces connect directly to the adjacent Crow Museum and future Arts Plaza, creating places for performances, events, art installations, and everyday student life.
This first look highlights the master plan, physical models, and conceptual studies that transformed vision into reality. The cultural masterplan and buildings within are about creating places where art, performance, learning, and community come together.
#utdallas #utdbass #athenaeum #morphosisarchitects #performingarts
Work is wrapping up on the concert hall wood ceiling at the new Bass School at UT Dallas Performance Hall on The University of Texas at Dallas campus. Over 2,600 custom cut wood panels make up the ceiling! These will be some of the last views of ceiling up close prior to the floor scaffolding being taken down so the rest of the space can be worked on.
Client: @utdbass@ut_dallas
Architecture: @morphosisarchitects w/ @gffdesign
General Contractor (and 📸): @beckgroup
Wood Ceiling: @rulon_international
Wood Install: @bakertriangle
Scenes from LA REBUILDS exhibition at the Helms Design Center, organized by Cal Poly LA Metro Program.
On view: our Palisades Courtyard House model (3/8" = 1'-0"), developed as part of Case Study 2.0, a catalog of single-family model homes intended to support faster, more resilient rebuilding. Designed for typical 40- and 50-foot lots, the house is organized with open living below, private rooms above, and a courtyard at the center, with overhangs extending space at the front and back.
Thank you to Jane Horowitz (@artgal.la ) and the Los Angeles Times (@latimes ) for a fantastic article highlighting our brilliant friend Mr. Wash (@mrwashtheartist ) 🌟
Fulton Leroy Washington, aka Mr. Wash, spent 21 years in prison for a nonviolent drug conviction he was innocent of. In 2016, President Obama commuted his sentence. In the last 10 years, he has been featured in museum and gallery exhibitions around the world. During this time, he has also been designing and fundraising for Art by Wash Studio and Community Center - a place for formerly incarcerated artists with studios, housing and support services.
Visit the LA times website to learn more about his story and his plans for his Art By Wash Studio and Community Center.
📸: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times
🚧 The work continues for Athenaeum Phase II as it begins to take shape as a remarkable landmark for performance, music, education, and culture on the @ut_dallas campus!
The new space will feature several classrooms and faculty offices, two large rehearsal rooms, a variety of instrumental teaching studios, and multiple practice rooms, all designed to support the growing needs of our music and arts community.
#UTDBass #UTDallas #UTDArts #Athenaeum
Sun Tower in Seoul was one of the first examples of a second skin in our work, an early attempt to separate surface from body. The perforated metal "fabric" wraps and bends with the setback requirements like a garment, reflecting the client’s work as a clothing manufacturer.
The diagrams here show this logic of folding and assembly, closer to a sewing pattern than a conventional facade study. Created in 1996, they also represent an interesting point in analog / digital evolution -- digitally generated and then printed to slides for projection in lectures, which gives them the luminosity. These are scans of those slides.
Project Architect Jamie Wu reports from the site of the future Performance Hall and Music Building at UT Dallas, where the interior is starting to take shape...
Phase I Museum, Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum. Richardson, Texas.
#morphosisarchitects #thebeckgroup #crowmuseum #architecturephotography #utdallas
As Spring Festival week comes to a close, Morphosis Architects extends warm wishes for a Happy New Year of the Horse! Thank you for walking alongside us over the past year. We wish you swift success, flourishing endeavors, family well-being, and smooth progress in all things.
- from our team in Shanghai, Los Angeles, New York, Dubai, and Seoul
Architectural flexibility — photo courtesy Jasmine Park / architect: @morphosisarchitects / building: Kolon One & Only Tower in Seoul is a contemporary corporate campus that merges laboratories, offices, and shared social spaces into a flexible, innovation-driven environment. Defined by a dynamic, high-performance façade and adaptable floor plates, the building expresses KOLON Group’s commitment to technology, collaboration, and sustainability, positioning architecture as an active framework that balances research performance, employee well-being, and a forward-looking corporate identity.
.
#Seoul #SouthKorea #campus
Revisiting Hypo Alpe-Adria Center in Klagenfurt as a way of thinking about central banking as a typology: secure workplaces but also cultural and spatial institutions negotiating trust, authority, and everyday community through architecture and iconography.
Central banks sit between infrastructure and civic space, operating at a national/global scale, but experienced locally through atm visits, tedious errands, walking shortcuts, and neighborhood visibility.
For Hypo, the bank was conceived less as a singular object and more as an urban corner extending the edge of the town, with a kindergarten, café, commercial spaces, and public spaces joining the offices and bank branch. To accommodate this program, the building folded into the landscape, split into intersecting volumes, and was cut through by public paths and courtyards that extended existing street patterns into the site. Financial program, public circulation, and civic space were deliberately interwoven.
