Overview
Moody Center is a 15,000-seat arena where Longhorn basketball, live music, Austin culture, and campus community converge.
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Opportunity
UT needed more than a basketball arena; Moody Center had to become a hub for campus athletics, live music, and Austin’s civic culture.
Today’s student athletes, fans, and community members expect campus venues to do more than host games. UT needed a multipurpose arena that could serve Longhorn basketball, major concerts, family programming, and public gatherings while strengthening the university’s relationship with Austin. The venue also needed to complete the campus athletics master plan, connect surrounding facilities through an active plaza, and become an anchor for a larger innovation district blending higher education, medicine, housing, live music, retail, and sports.
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Why This Matters
01
Beyond Game Day
The arena needed to support basketball, concerts, events, and community gatherings, making campus sports infrastructure useful far beyond a single season.
02
Campus-City Connection
Moody Center strengthens the connection between UT and Austin by linking athletics, live music, public life, and the emerging innovation district.
03
Austin Cultural Identity
Designing a uniquely-Austin venue meant honoring local creativity, music, food, materiality, and community, not simply delivering another arena.
What an amazing facility and just a spectacular jewel that our campus community, basketball teams, the city of Austin and the music and entertainment industry can proudly call their home.
Solution
The design for Moody Center merges arena performance, campus arrival, hospitality, and Austin placemaking into one flexible year-round venue.
Gensler designed the arena as an immersive journey, from Dell Technologies Plaza to the seating bowl. A transparent, window-wrapped exterior broadcasts the energy inside while connecting the venue to campus, the Capitol View Corridor, and the city. Indoor and outdoor gathering spaces, generous concourses, terraces, local food and beverage, and club environments create an inclusive fan experience at every ticket level. The venue can scale from intimate live shows for 5,000 people to games and concerts for more than 15,000 fans.
Related Content
15,000+ seats
Seating Capacity
LEED Gold Certified
Sustainability Achievement
95% diverted from landfill
Construction Waste Diversion
From brief to build: how a campus arena became a flexible sports, music, and placemaking engine for Austin.
The design process balanced performance, flexibility, campus identity, and guest experience. The team shaped a venue that could toggle between basketball, concerts, intimate shows, and community events while remaining welcoming at every scale. Process priorities included connecting all athletic facilities through a game-day plaza, preserving heritage trees, integrating indoor-outdoor social spaces, supporting large touring acts through robust back-of-house logistics, and embedding sustainable systems such as bottom-up cooling, daylight, shade, water reduction, and efficient landscape strategies.
Early Sketch
An early sketch of Moody Center during the design process. The steep grade change on the site presented a challenge and an opportunity.
Impact
Moody Center redefined the campus arena as a year-round anchor for sports, music, culture, and Austin community life.
The venue now supports UT basketball, major concerts, community events, campus life, and Austin’s broader live-performance identity.
What Changed Because of This
01
Fan Experience
Generous concourses, terraces, clubs, local food, and clear circulation create an accessible, energetic experience at every ticket level.
02
Live Performance
The arena supports major touring acts, live music, and intimate shows, expanding Gensler’s relevance in performance venue design.
03
Cultural Placemaking
The Tempo Program, local artists, and Austin-inspired storytelling turn the concourse into a civic expression of creativity.
The success story of this project is that everyone: the design team, the client, the university, bought into this vision that the arena could become this really special place where people create incredible memories over the course of their lives.
Recognition
ArchDaily
Billboard Magazine
Austin Monthly Magazine
Team
Project Leadership
FAQ
What events does Moody Center host?
How many people can Moody Center seat?
How does the venue support live performances?
What sustainability features are associated with Moody Center?
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