A five-ton 48-foot purple steel beam spotted with signatures and adorned with the Texas and U.S. flags now sits on top of the Tobin Center. Bruce Bugg, chair of the Bexar County Performing Arts Center Foundation said the topping of the structure is the end of one phase of the reconstruction.
"What we’re going to do is finish the external structural steel topping-out and then we’re going to move immediately to the next phase which is we’re going to close in the entire Tobin Center for the Performing Arts which will be completed next May," Bugg said.
After the exterior of the building is closed in, interior construction can begin; that is expected to be completed in May of 2014, which will then be followed by fine tuning the acoustics of the building.
David Filner, the new president of the San Antonio Symphony said he is really looking forward to the final tuning.
"The acoustics are going to be so great and so much improved that part of what’s going to be interesting to the audience is the really big kinds of pieces – Strauss, Wagner, those kinds of things – but also things like Mozart and Haydn that are smaller, that being able to hear better is going to really transform that experience," Filner said.
The symphony will be one of the many organizations to call the Tobin Center home. Former San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger, who helped kick-start the funding for the center, said it will be the nexus for the performing arts troops like the ballet and opera.
"They’d really not had a place to go," Hardberger said. "I mean, they kind of went here-and-there and they’d find a theater that wasn’t being used or whatever. But this is actually home base, so it’s going to grow the arts I think a great deal."
The center – which has 91 percent of its $203 million funding - still has a little less than two years until completion in September of 2014.
