Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

Dallas puts its outdoor stage under the skyline and a Foster and Partners roof. Annette Strauss Square, the open-air venue of the AT&T Performing Arts Center at 2389 Flora Street, honours the late Dallas mayor whose advocacy shaped the Arts District around it. The original Artist Square opened in 1988 as a modest city-built lawn and stage for artists who could not afford grander rooms; renamed for Strauss in 1998, it closed in 2005 and was reborn in September 2010 as a permanent 128,000-square-foot facility designed by Foster and Partners within the new center. The rebuilt square is engineered like an indoor hall turned inside out: a performance lawn graded toward the stage for sightlines, a permanent directional sound system, elevated side terraces doubling as viewing platforms and concession decks, and the Shannon and Ted Skokos Pavilion - its stage house clad in diamond-shaped panels of silver anodized aluminum and brushed zinc that shimmer as the light moves, with roller shutters that retract to deploy the speaker arrays. Concrete site walls screen the Woodall Rodgers traffic and form the ticketing boundary for paid events. Capacity runs past 2,000 on the lawn and up to 5,000 with the surrounding Sammons Park pressed into service, hosting concerts, festivals, theatre and dance under the downtown towers. When nothing is ticketed the square reverts to public space - part of the pedestrian weave connecting the Winspear Opera House, Wyly Theatre and Moody Performance Hall - with the M-Line streetcar and the center's underground garages handling arrivals. The Porch at Strauss Square adds a casual bar-and-seating deck for smaller gatherings, and the venue's festival mode - multi-day events flowing between the lawn, the plaza and Sammons Park - has become a Dallas signature, from film nights to the center's free community series. Strauss herself, the city's first elected female mayor and a lifelong arts fundraiser, is remembered exactly as she would have chosen: with a stage anyone can walk up to on an ordinary afternoon.