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The translucent marble-panelled Perelman Center for the Performing Arts opens at Ground Zero in New York
After more than two decades of construction, the Perelman Center for the Performing Arts opened to the public on September 19, 2023. Designed by architecture firm REX, led by Joshua Ramos, the luminous cube-shaped building is set to become one of New York City’s cultural centers. The cornerstone and final piece in the 2023 master plan to rebuild the 16-acre World Trade Center site. The inaugural season will include commissions, world premieres, co-productions and collaborative work across theatre, dance, music, opera, film and more. Although it is only eight stories high, the place is distinguished by its monolithic facade made of translucent Portuguese marble.
The Perelman Center for the Performing Arts is named after businessman, philanthropist, and philanthropist Ronald O. Perelman, featuring three flexible venues: the John E. The Zuccotti Theater, which seats up to 450 people, the Mike Nichols Theater, which seats up to 250 people, and the 99-seat Doris Duke Theater. The three places can be used independently or in different combinations due to their carefully designed features. High-tech theatrical flexibility makes it possible to arrange audiences of more than 60 on stage with a seating capacity of 90 to 950. To achieve this, REX collaborated with executive architect Davis Brodie Bond, stage consultant Charcoalblue, and acoustics expert Threshold Acoustics.
The building’s most famous feature is its facade. Clad in nearly 5,000 half-inch-thick marble tiles, the facade allows light to shine in during the day and glow from within in the evening. The Portuguese veined marble from the Estremoz Luminati collection is coated on both sides with glass and integral insulating 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. Richly veined stone panels are carefully arranged on the façade to create lozenge-shaped patterns that add textural interest to the monolithic volume.
Located next to the memorial to the destroyed World Trade Center buildings, the new art center had to present an accurate and respectful image while creating an attractive space for the public. To accommodate the program on a narrow and complex site, with several layers of city infrastructure running beneath it, REX chose to raise the core spaces above street level, with a dark base supporting the marble cube.
The construction program is divided into three main levels. The public tier serves as a “living room” for downtown Manhattan, complete with restaurants, bars and outdoor terraces. The artists level contains the support areas, and the stage level provides performance spaces that, because of their compact flexibility, can accommodate many disciplines, from intimate drama to dance and opera. Designers have also created a toolkit for automated and manual technical systems to enable creatives to transform spaces to accommodate desired expressions and audience experiences.
The Perelman Center for the Performing Arts is one of the final buildings in Daniel Libeskind’s Ground Zero Master Plan, a vision to address and revitalize downtown New York’s financial center 11 years after the September 11 attacks while honoring the memory of the victims and their families. Nearby are the new performing arts center, the Santiago Calatrava World Trade Center Transportation Center, the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, and the recently completed National Shrine, a site destroyed during the attacks and recreated by Calatrava.
(tags for translation) Architecture