Rendering of the entrance to the new Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City. Image: Iwan Baan.
In Wednesday’s (9/13) New York Times, Michael Kimmelman writes, “The new Perelman Performing Arts Center is the most glamorous civic building to land in New York in years…. A floating, translucent marble cube, it nestles at the foot of One World Trade Center, just eight stories high, a runt in a herd of mega-tall commercial skyscrapers but impossible to miss. The $500 million, 129,000-square-foot project arrives at a moment, and in a New York, very different from the one in which it was conceived two decades ago. Back then … ground zero still a smoldering gravesite…. The focus after Sept. 11 was rightly on the families of victims … At the same time there were downtown residents and others who argued that a retort to terrorism—and what the neighborhood needed to come back to life—was a place for the arts…. Architect Joshua Ramus … [designed] three exquisitely engineered, shape-shifting theaters … Small, medium and large, they’re swathed in modular acoustic wood panels … and can be combined and reshuffled… Perelman’s success will now depend on its public space and program of events to entice visitors to the World Trade Center.”
