You are here

Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast » Gulf Coast » Houston (Harris County) » Downtown Houston » Alley Theatre

Alley Theatre

-A A +A
1968, Ulrich Franzen and Associates and MacKie and Kamrath. 615 Texas Ave.
  • (Photograph by Gerald Moorhead )

Under the direction of its founding director, Nina Vance, the Alley achieved a national reputation in the 1950s. New York City architect Ulrich Franzen and his associate Keith Kroeger, working with George C. Izenour and Bolt, Beranek and Newman, designed the Alley to contain an 800-seat thrust stage theater (in the windowless portion of the building abutting Smith Street), and the 300-seat Arena Theater in the basement beneath the entrance lobby at Texas Avenue and Louisiana Street. Franzen and Kroeger slotted a driveway from Texas Avenue through the ground floor of the building past the lobby, a spatial homage to the narrow, midblock passage through which patrons entered the Alley's first performance space and from which its name derives.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Gerald Moorhead et al.
×

Data

What's Nearby

Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts
Pennzoil Place
J. P. Morgan Chase Tower (Texas Commerce Tower)
Post Rice Lofts (Rice Hotel)
Niels Esperson Building

Citation

Gerald Moorhead et al., "Alley Theatre", [Houston, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-01-HN12.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Texas

Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013, 332-332.

If SAH Archipedia has been useful to you, please consider supporting it.

SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. But the Society of Architectural Historians, which created SAH Archipedia with University of Virginia Press, needs your support to maintain the high-caliber research, writing, photography, cartography, editing, design, and programming that make SAH Archipedia a trusted online resource available to all who value the history of place, heritage tourism, and learning.

,