After over two decades in the making, the Perelman Performing Arts Center opened to the public on September 19, 2023. The luminous cube-shaped building was designed by the architecture firm REX, led by Joshua Ramus, to become one of New York City’s cultural keystones and the final piece in the 2023 Master Plan for the rebuilding of the 16-acre World Trade Center site. The inaugural season will feature commissions, world premieres, co-productions, and collaborative work across theater, dance, music, opera, film, and more. While only eight stories high, the venue stands out due to its monolithic façade composed of translucent veined Portuguese marble.
Named for businessman, philanthropist, and benefactor Ronald O. Perelman, the Perelman Performing Arts Center features three flexible venues: the John E. Zuccotti Theater, seating up to 450 people, the Mike Nichols Theater seating up to 250, and the Doris Duke Theater with a capacity of 99 seats. All three venues can be used either independently or in various combinations due to their carefully engineered features. The high-tech theatrical flexibility enables more than 60 stage-audience arrangements with capacities ranging from 90 to 950 seats. To achieve this, REX collaborated with executive architect Davis Brody Bond, theater consultant Charcoalblue, and acoustician Threshold Acoustics.
The most recognizable feature of the building is its façade. Clad in nearly 5,000 half-inch thick marble tiles, the façade allows light to radiate in during the day and glow from within in the evening. The veined Portuguese marble of the Estremoz Luminati variety was laminated on both sides with glass and integrated insulated panels. The resulting stone-glass panels allow light to pass through while maintaining energy performance and protecting the marble from deterioration due to extreme weather conditions. The richly veined stone slabs are arranged carefully on the façade to create lozenge-shaped patterns that add textural interest to the otherwise monolithic volume.
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What Will Post-Pandemic Performance Venues Look Like?Located adjacent to the memorial of the destroyed World Trade Center buildings, the new art center had to present a subtle and respectful image while creating an inviting space for the public. To accommodate the program to the tight and complex location, with several layers of city infrastructure running beneath it, REX chose to elevate the primary spaces above street level, with a dark plinth supporting the marble cube.
The building program is divided into three main levels. The public layer acts as a ‘living room’ for downtown Manhattan, complete with restaurants, bars, and exterior terraces. The Artists' level contains the support areas, and the Theater Level provides the thee performance spaces which, because of their built-in flexibility, can accommodate a multiplicity of disciplines, from intimate drama to dance and opera. The designers also created a toolkit for automated and manual technical systems to enable creatives to transform the spaces to accommodate their desired expressions and audience experiences.
The Perelman Performing Arts Center is one of the last buildings in Daniel Libeskind’s Ground Zero Master Plan, a vision for healing and reactivating New York’s downtown financial center 11 years after the 9/11 attacks while also honoring the memory of the victims and their families. Located near the new performing arts center is Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Transportation Hub Oculus and the recently completed St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine, a site destroyed during the attacks and reimaged by Calatrava.
