Curtain Rises on Design for Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center

The Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center is designed to appear as a white box during the day and have an amber glow at night. Rendering: Luxigon

A monolithic marble cube by day, an amber-glowing cultural beacon by night, the last missing piece in the master plan for the World Trade Center site has finally shown its face.

Now officially called the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, the 90,000-square-foot building and its hyper-flexible interior spaces were revealed on Sept. 8 in a presentation at 7 World Trade Center, overlooking the site where it will be built next to 1 World Trade Center.

Joshua Prince-Ramus presents his design on Sept. 8 for the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center. (Presentation audio is edited.)

Its future long clouded by political and financial uncertainty, the estimated $250 million center is now moving forward with $75 million from Perelman and $100 million from the federal government through the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. The rest must be raised privately, said Maggie Boepple, the performance center’s president and director. An operating budget, she said, is being determined by a group of consultants.

Perelman announced that his friend Barbra Streisand will serve as chairwoman of the center’s board.

Presented by the building’s architect, Joshua Prince-Ramus of the Brooklyn firm REX, the center’s mostly windowless facade will be made of translucent marble panels wrapped in glass, allowing daylight in and, after dark, interior light out. Three performances spaces for audiences of 499, 250 and 99, designed by Andy Hayles of Charcoal Blue, can be combined and reconfigured (including a rehearsal room) into eight more arrangements that include a single, 1,200-seat auditorium. A cafe/bar and cabaret space is planned for the ground floor of the three-story structure.

“From having large rock-and-roll concerts to having small intimate voice theater we have untold capabilities for these live performances,” Boepple said. “We are alive all day. That means you can come for breakfast on your way to work, we will welcome members of the community to hang out, artists, workers, neighbors, we will have yoga classes, we even would like to have people be able to vote in this building.”

“We will be technologically advanced and digitally connected,” she added. “We will defy expectations.”