"Together, the two firms will create an amazing theater experience...unprecedented in quality, form and style," Bess Enloe, Dallas Center for the Performing Arts Foundation board member and committee chair, said in a prepared statement. To date, the foundation has collected $122 million of its $210-million goal for private donations to finance the project, which also calls for funding from the Dallas city coffer.

The theater is being configured to seat 600 while the proscenium will be designed with 700 seats. Key to the design is state-of-the-art technology to support productions, large or small. OMA's Rem Koolhaas, the 2000 Pritzker Prize winner, is the design architect and Dan Wood, an OMA partner in New York City, is the principal in charge for the project.

Hillier's credits include partnerships on the award-winning Lyric Theatre in Sydney, Australia and the Louis Vuitton North American headquarters in New York City. The firm recently completed an adaptive reuse of a historic bank building in Philadelphia into a Ritz-Carlton and the world headquarters for GlaxoSmithKline in London. Its Dallas projects now on the boards include Southern Methodist University's business school and the Dallas library.