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Architects: REX ARCHITECTURE
- Area: 129000 ft²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Iwan Baan
Text description provided by the architects. Adjacent to New York City’s most hallowed site, the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) is the cultural keystone and final public element in the World Trade Center master plan, embracing the restorative power of art as a counterpoint to the site’s commemorative import. A producing house for theater, music, dance, opera, and film, PAC NYC pioneers new forms of theatrical adaptability to amplify the creativity of its artists and empower directors to surprise patrons with new processions and viewing experiences upon each visit.
The building’s pure form—rotated and elevated to accommodate complex below- and at-grade constraints—is wrapped in translucent marble. By day, the volume is an elegant, bookmatched stone edifice acknowledging the solemnity of the 9/11 Memorial across the street. By night, this monolith dematerializes, subtly revealing PAC NYC’s creative energy inside.
A performance instrument, PAC NYC’s suite of theaters and scene docks can combine into ten (10) proportions and transform into sixty-two (62) stage-audience configurations, from 90 to 950 seats. Creative teams can transmute the spaces to fulfill their desired artistic expressions and audience experiences using a toolkit of automated and manual technical systems. They include four acoustic “guillotine” walls; four movable seating towers (for courtyard, horseshoe, in-the-round, thrust, and other formats); a two-tiered catwalk and walkable grid system; 56 “spiralifts” to mold the theaters’ floor into manifold geometries; and several removable catwalks and audience balconies. F
urther, a zone of mutability around the theaters—composed of eight acoustic doors, the cruciform of scene docks/assemblies, and a peripheral circulation loop—allows any of these areas to be allocated as front- or back-of-house and form unexpected lobbies and performance antechambers. Four elevator/stair couplets can also be used individually or in combination, creating diverse circulation sequences from the lobby. As a result of this immense flexibility, PAC NYC is a constant source of surprise for patrons, a “Mystery Box” whose experiences are scripted entirely by each director’s imagination.
To provide exceptional room acoustics within a radically flexible environment (with variable auditorium sizes and proportions; manifold possible stage and audience locations; and voices and instruments, both amplified and unamplified), the theaters are designed to aurally resemble a boundaryless, diffuse “forest clearing.” A perimeter wall of trees—with its random solids and voids—retains acoustic energy without imprinting a defined auditory signature: the ideal environment into which specific soundscapes can be tailored for each performance configuration.
To emulate a forest clearing’s geometry, a system of three planks—with one, two, and three “scoops”—were cost-effectively ripped out of walnut using crown molding knives. Because the scoops at the edge of each plank are of consistent radius, the planks always marry regardless of their arrangement or rotation. This enables 258 permutations of plank combinations. The plank geometries, their arrangements, and the voids between them were iteratively engineered and tested by the acoustician and architect to form an effectively random surface in a cost-effective and standardized manner.
