Project Overview
With nearly 30,000 students and an expansive campus sprawled across 645 acres, the University of Texas at Dallas has been serving students in Richardson, Texas, for more than six decades. To enhance and enrich the arts on campus, university officials designed the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum, a 12-acre cultural district featuring the Crow Museum of Asian Art. The two-story, 58,800-ft2 museum serves as the cornerstone of the O’Donnell Athenaeum and is the first structure completed within a larger master plan that provides for future additional cultural facilities. The stunning structure features 18,000 ft2 of dedicated exhibition space, more than doubling the Crow Museum’s current gallery space in its original location in downtown Dallas. To bring the university’s vision to reality, California architecture firm Morphosis partnered with Wells Concrete of Hillsboro, Texas, on a design anchored by 163 three-dimensional architectural precast concrete panels.
A Cultural Landmark for North Dallas
According to Arne Emerson, partner at Morphosis, early engagement between his firm and Wells Concrete during the schematic phase permitted real-time feedback on the project’s constructability, cost, and fabrication methods. Precast concrete was critical in achieving the architectural vision, which emphasizes formality, sculptural presence, and three-dimensional complexity. The use of precast concrete is part of a continuing tradition that began in the 1970s and 1980s, when the building material was used extensively across the University of Texas at Dallas campus. This treatment, however, takes precast concrete to new heights, resulting in a captivating design that serves as a signature structure within the expansive O’Donnell Athenaeum project.
“Precast concrete was selected to achieve multiple goals: realizing the ambitious architectural vision within budget, meeting the university’s aggressive construction timeline, and ensuring material longevity in the Texas climate,” Emerson says. “The material’s ability to accommodate complex forms and patterns made it the ideal choice for a design-driven envelope.”
For the façade, which comprises 163 three-dimensional precast concrete panels, the surface pattern was achieved through a repeatable system of overlapping formliners. With this setup, the project team was able to produce highly complex, sculptural surfaces in an efficient and cost-conscious manner. Each panel measures roughly 10 × 30 ft with an average thickness of 6½ in. Some of the panels feature concave, convex, or warped forms that required advanced digital modeling and custom computer numerical control– (CNC)-milled foam shapes. Wells Concrete’s in-house carpenters custom-built wooden molds around the foam to keep the project on schedule. Panels were further detailed with layered liner patterns to create depth and texture on the building’s exterior.
Advanced building information modeling (BIM) efforts played an extensive role in the design and construction of the Crow Museum. The Morphosis team prioritized embedding rich BIM data directly within geometry to optimize the structural precast concrete façade, delivering on a highly complex architectural vision through seamless digital integration, fabrication efficiency, and construction precision. Using a hybrid workflow across Rhino, Grasshopper, CATIA, and Revit, each of the unique panels was developed with embedded data—such as origin points, coordinates, and unique IDs—to facilitate accurate modeling, fabrication, and installation. This approach balanced visual dynamism with rationalized production, aligning panel shapes to formwork constraints and weight considerations. Overall, the holistic use of BIM, from design and detailing through fabrication and field execution, demonstrates how digital modeling can bridge architectural ambition with construction efficiency.
The resulting structure is one university officials, students, and the wider public can all be proud of as future phases of the O’Donnell Athenaeum master plan are completed.
“The Crow Museum stands not only as a cultural landmark for the campus, but also as a benchmark for what is possible through material-driven design and interdisciplinary collaboration,” Emerson says. “The façade met the aesthetic requirements while also delivering on durability, low maintenance, and cost-effectiveness, demonstrating precast’s value—beyond structure—as a comprehensive enclosure system.”
Mason Nichols is a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based writer and editor who has covered the precast concrete industry since 2013. |