Embracing the restorative power of art, the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) is the cultural keystone and final public element in the World Trade Center master plan. A producing house for music, theater, dance, opera, and film, PAC NYC pioneers new forms of theatrical adaptability to amplify the creativity of its artists, and surprise patrons with new arrival and viewing experiences upon each visit. The building’s pure form—rotated and elevated due to complex below-grade constraints—is wrapped in translucent marble. By day, the volume is an elegant, book-matched stone edifice acknowledging the solemnity of its context. By night, this monolith dematerializes, subtly revealing the creative energy inside.

To accommodate the program on the tight, complex site, PAC NYC is organized into three main levels, with the layout of the performance spaces driving the design. The Public Level, entered first, presents a “living room” for Lower Manhattan, with a lobby stage for free programming and a restaurant, bar, and terrace. Above, the Artists Level contains all artist support areas—such as dressing rooms, costume shop, and green room—and the “trap” whose mechanical lifts transform the theaters’ floor on the third level. Lastly, the Theater Level provides three performance spaces—the Zuccotti (450 seats), the Nichols (250 seats), and the Duke (99 seats)—as well as two scene docks, two scene assemblies, and a rehearsal room.

Multi-form and multi-processional flexibility

The theaters can be combined into ten proportions and transformed into sixty-two stage-audience arrangements, ranging 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, including: four massive acoustic “guillotine” walls; four movable seating towers (enabling a range of stage formats, such as courtyard, horseshoe, theater-in-the-round, and thrust); a two-tiered system of interwoven catwalks and walkable grids; fifty-six "spiralifts" that allow the theaters’ floor to adopt manifold geometries; and a set of removable catwalks and demountable audience balconies.

Directors can further choreograph the audience’s entire experience through a zone of mutability around the theaters. Eight acoustic doors between the scene docks, the scene assemblies, and a circulation loop at the Theater Level’s periphery allow any of these areas to be apportioned as front- or back-of-house, and to form unexpected lobbies and performance antechambers. Four elevator/stair couplets can be used individually or in combination, creating constantly changing access sequences from the lobby. As a result of this immense flexibility, the Theater Level is a constant source of surprise for patrons, a “Mystery Box” whose experiences are scripted entirely by each director’s imagination.

Structure

The building’s structure weaves through four subterranean levels of infrastructure, including train tracks, subway lines, and high-security truck circulation; responds to the foundations of a previous design by another architect that provided minimal bearing capacity at the new design’s location; and responds to stringent blast and acoustic isolation requirements. To overcome the constraints, seven “super columns” thread through the below-grade infrastructure and branch out like spider webs to grab bearing capacity wherever possible. From these awkwardly spaced super columns, the structure was reverse-engineered, resolving the columns into a structural plate, on top of which a massive belt truss ties the entire building together.

The three theaters are nestled atop the plate and within the belt truss. Like ships in a bottle, the auditoria are box-in-a-box structures, floating independently from each other and the rest of the building on foot-thick high-density rubber pads, allowing simultaneous performances while protecting them from vibration caused by the trains, subways, and trucks below. To resolve blast requirements while minimizing weight, the building relies on the suppleness of its unique marble-glass façade and complex hardened plate steel assemblies that protect the egress stairs and mechanical rooms.

Acoustics

To provide exceptional room acoustics within thisradically 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 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 flawlessly regardless of their arrangement or rotation. This enables 258 permutations of single, double, and triple plank combinations. The plank geometries, their arrangements, and the voids between them were iteratively engineered and tested to form an effectively random surface in a cost-effective and standardized manner. Variable acoustic banners within the zone of the catwalks and gridirons enable each performance typology and geometry to be specifically tuned. Unistrut is installed between the planks at 5' intervals to enable mounting of theatrical scenography and equipment to the walls.

Facades

The façade is composed of 1/2"-thick translucent, veined Portuguese marble slabs, laminated on both sides with glass and sealed to avoid water infiltration and thermal hysteresis. The outer glass lite has a micro-texture resembling honed 400 stone to mask its presence. The 5’ x 3’ marble-glass laminates are integrated into insulated glass units (IGUs) stacked four atop each other and ganged into 5’ x 12’ curtain wall mega-panels. These mega-panels facilitate efficient fabrication, shipping, and installation onto steel HEB sections hung from the top of the building. Once the mega-panels are installed, any individual IGU can be demounted and reinstalled independently of any other, as though it were unitized.

Through a “book-matching” process, the 4,896 marble-glass panels are arranged so that their marble veining forms a biaxially symmetric pattern, repeated identically on all four sides of the building. Due to the duration of quarrying, slabbing, honing, tiling, and laminating the marble, then assembling the marble-glass panels into IGUs and mega-panels, the composition of each 20% of the panels had to be determined prior to knowing what the next 20% coming out of the ground looked like. Due to its aesthetic strength, biaxial symmetry was determined to be the only pattern that guaranteed a compelling result, even if its final composition was unknown until the process’ end.