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For a long time the city of Dallas has been like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. It wants to be a contender, a world-class city. It already has a few of the prerequisites — a skyline, an NFL franchise and a serious traffic problem. But until you have the full panoply of major cultural venues, you're Palookaville.

So for many years the city has been trying to put together an ambitious downtown arts district, an ensemble of museums, theaters and an opera house designed by marquee-name architects. And last weekend Dallas celebrated the opening of two of the final big pieces of the puzzle. One of them, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, is the product of a collaboration between the Dutch architect-polemicist Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of REX Architects. The other, the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, is from the mighty office of the British architect Lord Norman Foster. The buildings are so unlike each other they're barely on speaking terms, but in their different ways, they both answer what the city has been looking for.

It's taken more than three decades to fill in the blanks on the still-not-quite-completed Dallas arts district. The curtain went up on the master plan in 1977 and nearly went right down the next year when voters rejected a bond issue to fund it. It wasn't until 1984 that the first element was completed, the Dallas Museum of Art, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Five more years went by before the debut of the Meyerson Symphony Center, a sweeping exercise in creamy culture-luxe by I.M. Pei. Then a long pause until the vaulted chambers of Renzo Piano's magnificent Nasher Sculpture Center opened in 2003.

Far from being a disadvantage, the piecemeal development of the 68-acre district was a blessing in disguise. Instead of producing an instant suite of palazzi frozen in their moment, which is a fair description of New York City's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Dallas put together a diverse sampling of work by leading architects from across three decades. And with the Wyly and Winspear, very diverse. It would be hard to imagine two architects more unlike each other than Foster, the meticulous inheritor of the principles of High Modernism, and Koolhaas, who has spent a lifetime sorting through those principles to see which ones had to go. Foster's buildings tend toward the serene and Cartesian. Koolhaas is apt to arrive at the ruptured and irregular. Foster is given to sleek materials and finely honed finishes. Koolhaas isn't above slapping what looks like AstroTurf on an outdoor terrace at the Wyly. Both of them have scored the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honor, but, to put it mildly, not for the same reasons.

It goes without saying that they've never been known as fans of each other's work. During the more than five years it took to bring the Wyly and Winspear from the design phase to completion, representatives of the two firms rarely showed up in Dallas at the same time, preferring arm's-length communication by e-mail and conference calls. Stories about the exasperation of the Dallas powers-that-be started turning up in the local press. As a further twist, three years ago the Wyly's co-designer, Prince-Ramus, who headed the New York branch of Koolhaas' firm, broke away to start his own outfit, REX Architects. Though Koolhaas remained connected to the Wyly commission, it was largely Prince-Ramus who saw it through to completion and gets credited as "principal in charge."

For all that, the buildings came through fine. The exterior of the Wyly is a blunt 11-story box wrapped in a palisade of vertical aluminum tubes. From head-on it looks like a silvery bar code that's been sliced by asymmetrical window slots. Anyone approaching it will be on a journey even before the play begins. You enter by way of a descent, a wide concrete ramp that slopes down to a glass-walled lobby, one story below ground, made of stark concrete and gray metal, where light swords hang like stalactites from the ceiling. From the time of Orpheus and before, a subterranean journey has had psychological reverberations. This one bears just a hint of a descent into a stony underworld, a primordial cavern that could be the ancient womb of theater — even if you're there just to see Mamma Mia!

Then comes the journey back up to the light. To get from the lobby, you climb one of two narrow stairways that lead to the theater, a stark, black-paneled performance space that can seat 600, with lime green upholstery that may or may not be a metaphor for rebirth. In most theaters, the auxiliary spaces — things like the lobby, rehearsal rooms, café and offices — surround the auditorium. Because the Wyly stacks those on the floors above and below, it was possible to surround the stage area with glass walls on three sides. Directors can use the outside world as a backdrop to the action on stage or close it off with large shades.

This is unusual but not unheard of. A few years ago the architects Diller, Scofidio & Renfro provided the same kind of glass-walled backdrop for the theater they designed as part of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, and it's worked well there, though one factor may be that it looks out on a water view that's calmer and more predictable than a cityscape. The Wyly is also a very flexible cavity, with movable banks of seats and balconies that can slide in and out or fly up and disappear. Even the proscenium can be raised and lowered. The idea here is that theater has ancient roots and a completely unpredictable future.

To stroll from the Wyly to the Winspear Opera House just across from it is to go from the raw to the cooked. The Wyly is a box full of ideas about ways to organize the theatergoing experience, but it has a deliberately rawboned feel, with few concessions to anybody's ideas of elegance, no grand limestone swoops like the one Pei provided for the lobby of his symphony hall nearby. Foster and his head of design, Spencer de Grey, weren't interested in rethinking the opera house from the ground up. What they did instead was briskly update it in Foster's gleaming but uncompromisingly modern glass-and-steel idiom.

The Winspear consists of three main elements that radiate outward. At its center is the performance hall, a 2,200-seat, horseshoe-shaped venue with a stage deep enough to accommodate elaborate scenery and traveling Broadway musicals, the kind of stage Dallas has never had. From the outside the performance hall appears as a tall crimson oblong, like a bright red hatbox. That oblong is contained within a wraparound glass-walled lobby with a sweeping interior staircase that snakes upward along the curving red walls. The glass box is in turn surrounded on all sides by a massive steel canopy supported by slender steel columns.

Taken together, it all makes you think of those wide-brimmed hats that English women wear to the races at Ascot. The stated purpose of the canopy is to act as a vast, three-acre sunscreen, making the plaza a more inviting place to mingle even on hot summer days. The unstated purpose is to give an otherwise highly distilled structure an extra bit of geometric gee-wizardry. Which it does.

All that remains now is for Dallas to take possession of what it has built, to bring on the crowds and make itself that contender.

• Richard Lacayo
• With the opening of a new theater and opera house, Dallas comes two giant steps closer to tying the bow on its downtown performing-arts mecca