The long anticipated performing arts center at the World Trade Center took two significant steps on the path from proposal to reality in recent days. On Thursday, the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey voted to authorize a lease for the facility within the World Trade Center complex for 99 years, at a nominal rent of one dollar per year. (The same lease will contain provisions for an optional extension of an additional 99 years, as well as the option for the performing arts center to purchase the space if occupies, also for one dollar.)
Once this lease is signed, the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center (named for the billionaire philanthropist who donated $75 million in 2016) will pay the Port Authority $48 million it has received from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, to reimburse the Authority for costs incurred during below-ground construction at the site, making the location ready for the planned building.
In a separate, but related development, officials at the Perelman Performing Arts Center say they have now raised more than 80 percent of the building’s projected construction of $360 million.
On Friday, the Perelman Performing Arts Center announced that it had signed Bill Rauch, the highly regarded artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to take the creative helm in the World Trade Center facility. Local residents will be familiar with Mr. Rauch’s work, because the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a pipeline that feeds Broadway, with such productions as 2014’s “All the Way” (directed by Mr. Rauch, which won Tony awards for Best Play and Best Actor), along with a pair of acclaimed Broadway dramas from 2017 — “Indecent” and “Sweat.”
Mr. Rauch called his new position with the Perelman Center, “a tremendous opportunity to be part of fostering a place for transformative art to take place and cultivating a community gathering space at a site that has such powerful emotional resonance for New York City, our country and the world.”
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The diaphanous marble walls of the Performing Arts Center will also transform the facility into a luminous geometric solid by night, as interior light suffuses outward through the facade.
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The Perelman Center’s president and director, Maggie Boepple, said, “we know that Bill will plan a spectacular first season, building on the remarkable progress that we have made over the past few years.”
The progress to which Ms. Boepple referred included recruiting not only Mr. Rauch and Mr. Perelman, but also Barbra Streisand, who chairs the Perelman Center’s board of directors, and finalizing a design for the facility, by Brooklyn-based architectural firm, REX.
The vision for the structure is nearly as bold as the performances it will house. The REX design calls for a visually stunning, translucent marble cube that will appear as a windowless, white geometric solid by day, but by night will be transformed into a glowing alabaster hexahedron, suspended above the World Trade Center Plaza. This effect will be achieved with the use of white marble, shaved so thin that light from the outside will penetrate the building’s facade during the day, while light from the inside with radiate outward through the structure’s skin during the evening, giving it a milky iridescence. Joshua Prince-Ramus, the principal architect at REX, hopes to harvest this marble from the same Vermont quarry that was used during the construction of two Washington, D.C. landmarks: the U.S. Supreme Court building and the Jefferson Memorial.
The facility within these walls will encompass 200,000-square-feet of space, including three auditoria (with 499, 250, and 99 seats), and a rehearsal studio, which will also double as a fourth venue — all separated by moveable, acoustic guillotine walls that allow for eleven different arrangements of space.