New York, New York, USA
Architectural think-tank REX’s founder Joshua Prince-Ramus and his creative team complete The Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center (The Perelman Center).
The purpose of the building is to produce and premiere original works of theater, dance, music, film, and opera, transforming Lower Manhattan into a vibrant, global cultural heart.
Its concept embodies the Center’s aim to defy experiential expectations, provide unparalleled flexibility, foster artistic risk, deliver the most technologically advanced and digitally connected spaces for creative performance, and engage the local community.
This design has been awarded a 2021 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The keystone and final piece of the World Trade Center master plan, The Perelman Center embraces creation and memory with respectful individuality.
Amidst gleaming glass towers on the north side of the 9/11 Memorial.
The Perelman Center is a pure form, rotated and elevated to accommodate complex below-grade constraints, address the 9/11 Museum and transportation hub, and engage the site’s main pedestrian streets of Greenwich and Fulton.
The edifice is wrapped in translucent, veined marble—from the same Vermont quarry as the U.S. Supreme Court building and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial—laminated within insulated glass.
By day, the volume is an elegant, book-matched stone edifice, whose simplicity and traditional material acknowledge the solemnity of its context.
By night, this monolith dematerializes: silhouettes of human movement and theatrical configurations animate the glowing enclosure, an invitingly subtle revelation of the creative energy inside.
While the building’s pristine exterior befits the site, its muscular, utilitarian interior expresses the workhorse quality necessary for the changing nature of The Perelman Center’s artistic needs.
Steel walls, concrete trusses, wood floors, perforated plywood panels, and other ruggedly beautiful materials encourage the frequent transformation of scenery, stage audience configurations, and even the restaurant/bar and lobby.
The Perelman Center is organized in three levels—Public (bottom), Performer (middle), and Play (top).
The layout and character of the Play Level drive the design of the entire building.
The Play Level is a pioneering, highly adaptable performance palette that combines both multi-form and multi-professional flexibility.
It holds three auditoria (499-, 250- and 99-person) and a rehearsal room which can double as a fourth venue.
Using large, acoustic, guillotine walls that separate them, the three auditoria can be combined to form seven additional, unique performance spaces, for a total of eleven arrangements—including the rehearsal room venue—which can all adopt manifold stage audience configurations.
Right below the Play Level, the Performer Level contains all support areas for performances and artists, such as trap, dressing rooms, green room, musician room, quiet room, wig storage, and costume shop.
Artists have direct, private access to the Play Level via a dedicated elevator/stair couplet, or—if blurring the line between performer and patron is desired—the other three public couplets.
The Public Level includes a lobby with an information desk and coat check, and a
restaurant/bar that can transform into a cabaret, a dance podium, a performance art space, or a “living room” for Lower Manhattan community events such as voting.
The Perelman Center’s exterior staircase brings theater patrons and visitors from the lobby back down to the street below.
Half this grand stair offers generous seating for people who want to linger, watch the bustling city around, or contemplate the beautiful memorial across the way.
With its artistic freedom, openness to the community, pure form, and material duality, The Perelman Center galvanizes the culture of New York City’s lower downtown and asserts its place amongst the World Trade Center’s constellation of world-class buildings.
Project: The Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center
Architects: REX
Associate Architects: Davis Brody Bond, LLP
Client: The Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at The World Trade Center
Contractor: Sciame Construction
