Open at last, the Perelman Performing Arts Centre at the World Trade Center site is flexible and understated
The World Trade Center site is a mess. All that discussion, all that discourse, the heart-rending and hand-wringing in the end resulted in a hypercommercial cluster of banal towers with the dazzling white monstrous rib cage of Santiago Calatrava’s transportation hub at its core.
On the other hand, what was previously an office-hours-only plaza has, since the Twin Towers’ brutal destruction, become a surprisingly active civic landscape of memory. The gaping, gushing holes of the memorials marking out the base of the former towers still attract crowds standing quietly in line for the 9/11 Museum and to buy souvenirs at the official stands. Tragedy has turned an office park into an actual piece of city with greenery, extensive public space and a constant flow of people.
Yet it has always felt unresolved, a landscape of work and remembrance but not living culture, ringed by truck traps, bomb barriers and the steely manifestations of an architecture of fear. A cultural component was always planned, first in the form of a tottering stack of blocks designed by Frank Gehry (a project abandoned in 2014) and now, finally, a generation after 9/11, realised in the glowing, marble-clad form of the Perelman Performing Arts Centre (PAC).
This $500mn cube is a lovely looking thing, a pure, simple box. Try to do too much here and you just consolidate the mess, so architect Joshua Ramus and his office REX have done just enough: a building that seems relaxed about its form and resistant to the varying scales and meanings of the things around it.
The Perelman Performing Arts Centre is that Modernist fantasy, a flexible theatre. Designed to accommodate anything from lavish musicals to community theatre, intimate gigs to Shakespeare, the cube contains three theatres arranged in an L-shape with dozens of permutations of stage arrangement, seating and capacity. Here transformation is embodied in guillotine walls descending from the grid to change spatial arrangements, and there is a truly ingenious set of stage machinery based on spiralling columns (Ramus compares them to Slinky spring toys) that facilitate lowering and raising of stages, pits, seating and raking.
These spiralling rods also reveal the constraints of this site. Conventional hydraulics are ruled out because the pistons would need to descend into the depths — but the building sits atop a convoluted complex of tunnels, access ways and loading bays for Calatrava’s Oculus and the city’s most complicated and expensive subway interchange below. This is a building with no bottom.
That might have been difficult enough but it pales in comparison to the structural complexities. A decision was made to base the PAC around Gehry’s abandoned design, of which structural parts remained; the architects then had to build on top of the distorted grid of Gehry’s foundations while accommodating the subterranean infrastructure. Ramus described it to me “as a game of structural Twister, with one hand over here, a leg over there, your body contorted” — he leans on a tree and buckles his leg awkwardly, to demonstrate.
Might it not have made more sense to design a looser building? One more akin to Gehry’s free-form stacking? “No,” he shoots back. “We felt it should be something as simple as possible, something with a purity of form. It becomes complex through the work the theatre produces.”
Ramus is tall, lean, chiselled, almost monkish in his demeanour. He is not yet a familiar name in Europe but, as the embodiment of the New York office of OMA (founded by Rem Koolhaas), he built one of this century’s most brilliant public buildings, the Seattle Public Library (2004), It is an extravagant, folded and cantilevered form containing a continuous angular spiral ramp of books, all wrapped in a structural fishnet stocking and capped by a wonderfully democratic reading room. He was also responsible for the Wyly Theatre in Dallas (2009), a precursor to the Perelman in its flexibility, a smart stack of interlocking performance spaces. In those two buildings, perhaps, we see the genesis of the PAC: the complex structure and the flexible stack, the very public and the deceptively simple.
The most expressive layer of this building, however, is its surface. Exquisitely grained, creamy Portuguese marble is arranged into a patterned grid. Ramus describes the centre, in which the grain is heavier and darker, as a “turbulent zone” that gives way to a “calm zone” as it reaches towards the edges and the grain fades a little. It looks to me a little like a Rorschach test for Ground Zero, a stone-screed in which the city can read and reinterpret its own meanings.
The obvious precedent is the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of SOM and opened almost exactly 60 years ago. Its diaphanous marble skin glows but it would today fail all environmental criteria, so the PAC’s panels are laminated in glass and their supporting structure is finer. Behind the marble is a series of walkways, a circulation zone defined by that sunny, marble-grained glow during the day; at night the osmosis is reversed and the building becomes gently illuminated from within, a faint lantern of subtlety.
Those internal walkways afford no view on to the memorials or the rest of the site. This is a blind-box building, its only ornament its own skin — deliberately so. Ramus “lived two blocks away from Ground Zero”, he says. “I lost my apartment and all my belongings. I couldn’t think about people emerging at the interval and looking down at the memorials. It wouldn’t have been respectful, these two worlds colliding.”
A restaurant and public space above the plaza are designed to be open and accessible and include a stage for local acts or community performances. Designed by David Rockwell, its streamlined, dynamic ceiling looks a little antithetical to the otherwise stripped-back architecture, but it seems to work. It leads to an angular roof terrace overlooking the neighbouring 1930s buildings from which you realise the height of the cube neatly matches the plinths of the Art Deco towers, rooting it in the scale of the city.
At the time of their design, the voids in place of the Twin Towers were criticised for their emptiness, and there was much support for the towers being rebuilt. But in retrospect it seems a good decision. In its way, this cube of a building looks like a riposte to the holes, a simple volume extruded rather than excavated, light, elegant and unassuming. A container for culture amid the difficult collision of transit, trauma and tourism, the presence of the past and the perennial present.
Source: Financial Times
