About a year ago, on one of those brilliantly sunny late autumn mornings, I cut through the World Trade Center and encountered, for the first time, the completed facade of the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC).
At first glance, it looked like a gigantic liquid crystal display, a mega version of the kind of toy that forms changing patterns as it sits in your hand. If I turned away for a moment and looked back, I was sure, the tight clusters of diagonal lines on what appeared to be a silvery grid would completely rearrange themselves. It was more like something I’d expect to see in Times Square than a building on the aesthetically and philosophically troubled acreage of Ground Zero.
Which, coming from me, is high praise.
Twenty years ago, I came home to New York after spending a few years in San Francisco spearheading the startup of Dwell magazine. I hadn’t intended to stay on the West Coast forever, but my retreat was hastened by 9/11, which reinforced my allegiance to New York and made it unbearable to be elsewhere.
Soon after my return, I decided that my primary professional task would be to document the planning, design, and construction of the new World Trade Center. I attended countless press events and Lower Manhattan Development Corporation board meetings; some of them, staged in the palm tree–studded Winter Garden of what was then known as the World Financial Center (now Brookfield Place), were grandiose public spectacles where speeches by politicians like then governor George Pataki and architects like David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Norman Foster, and Daniel Libeskind were aired on local and national TV. For one emotionally charged, topsy-turvy moment architecture was news—not Arts & Leisure news, but Live at Five news.
Now it’s hard to imagine.
At the end of each Winter Garden feeding frenzy, I’d walk up the marble steps at the back of the atrium, newly restored post-9/11, and gaze out the windows overlooking the World Trade Center site. And I would try to picture how each component of the new development would fit in: the skyscraper that then governor George Pataki anointed the Freedom Tower, the handful of lesser towers, the memorial and museum, Santiago Calatrava’s transit hub, intended to represent a bird in flight … I tried to square all the flowery rhetoric, political and architectural, with the messy reality in front of me. And I could never quite do it. The more specific the designs for the individual components became, the less I could imagine a coherent whole.
So it’s not terribly surprising that once the thing was largely built out and open to the public, it didn’t live up to my expectations. I mean, what were my expectations? There were some office towers. None of them great, although I have tremendous affection for SOM’s 7 WTC (on the north side of Vesey Street), with its beautifully iridescent glass, and a grudging admiration for Fumihiko Maki’s 4 WTC. I was genuinely moved by the museum (designed by Snøhetta above ground and Davis Brody Bond below) on my first and only visit—I admired the incredible depth of its collection of 9/11 artifacts and oral histories and the raw energy of its curation—but I also found the experience so draining that I’ve never set foot in it again. And I’ve long felt that the moodiness and serenity in the early renderings of Michael Arad’s memorial, in which visitors could descend some thirty feet below street level to a meditative chamber tucked behind the waterfalls, was completely lost in the version that was finally built.
Just lately, the series of benches that line the exterior of the Oculus, along the north side of the thing, tucked between the jumbo white ribs, have emerged as my favorite spot in the complex. It’s a popular place to sit, offering passersby a simple amenity that the gaping white orifice within conspicuously lacks.
But my main problem is that this place hasn’t coalesced into a New York City neighborhood. It is still a “site.”
The new World Trade Center is, in its way, a stranger set of paradoxes than the old World Trade Center, those improbable boxes plopped down on a windy concrete plateau atop Manhattan's least fashionable shopping mall.
Sure, there’s a branch of Eataly in 4 WTC, and Brookfield Place, across West Street, did a fine job of reinventing the food court several years ago (before everything became a food hall). But it’s not a place New Yorkers go except maybe to work (office occupancy rates there are surprisingly high) or perhaps to worship at Calatrava’s oddly PoMo Greek Orthodox church. Or they go to mourn.
Part of the problem is that no one exactly lives there, although there is Battery Park City (population 17,000) just across West Street. Eventually, the Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates–designed 5 WTC, originally conceived as yet another office tower, will position 1,500 apartments, 400 of them affordable, immediately south of Calatrava’s church.
Because a memorial dominates the landscape, there’s a long list of rules in place to suppress spontaneous activity—no Frisbee, no dogs, no protests—but also it’s a tourist draw (complete with tour guides) so it lacks the tranquility befitting a place of contemplation and remembrance. The new World Trade Center is, in its way, a stranger set of paradoxes than the old World Trade Center, those improbable boxes plopped down on a windy concrete plateau atop Manhattan’s least fashionable shopping mall.
The newly opened PAC NYC, with its three theaters (maximum seating capacity is 950) and 400-seat restaurant, isn’t just the last major component of the master plan to be completed; it’s also the thing that might perform the necessary alchemy. Or, as PAC NYC board chair and former mayor Michael Bloomberg framed it at a September opening ceremony, this “cauldron of creativity” will “bring new life to this site and a brighter future for lower Manhattan.”
The fact that it exists at all is a miracle. The performing arts center prominently positioned in Libeskind’s master plan was supposed to be designed by Frank Gehry. It was slated to include a new thousand-seat home for Chelsea’s Joyce Theater, but the Joyce pulled out of the project. Other cultural institutions—SoHo’s Drawing Center and a proposed entity called the International Freedom Center (IFC), first envisioned as occupants of the building that later became the 9/11 Museum—might have been bundled into an omnibus arts building but were, instead, sent packing. The IFC’s intention to focus on the global history of genocide and crimes against humanity was reportedly offensive to some of the families of those who’d died on 9/11. The Drawing Center balked in 2005 after Governor Pataki said of the potential arts institutions at Ground Zero, “We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America.”
Nearly a decade later, in 2014, Gehry, whose concept for the building involved a too-casual heap of rectangular blocks, was fired from the project. It seemed like the new World Trade Center wasn’t destined to include the arts at all.
Finally, the Brooklyn architecture office REX, which began life as the New York outpost of Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), was chosen to design a scaled-back project (budgeted at half the original $400 million) with a 2019 completion date. Ultimately—and predictably—the project ate up $500 million and required a $75 million donation from billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, for whom the venue is named, and an unpublicized $130 million from Bloomberg, who, when asked about his discreet contribution by a New York Times reporter, responded, “I can afford it.”
Since my initial encounter with PAC NYC, I’ve visited the building three times. My first return trip was a hard hat tour in December 2022 that I signed up for specifically because I needed to know more about the facade. I was almost immediately disappointed; the material I’d assumed was some sort of high-tech wizardry was just plain old marble. “What is it about marble anyway?” another writer asked me. I replied with a sigh and a shrug.
But when I listened to REX’s founding principal, Joshua Ramus, standing in front of the building, holding forth about the facade and how it was created, I realized that I was looking at a highly technological object. This thoroughly conventional material had been manipulated, treated as if each piece of stone were a byte.
Ramus, in a subsequent interview, explained the process to me. A tight deadline (finally, after all these years!) required the architects to decide on the placement of nearly 5,000 marble tiles before the stone was even quarried. And they were worried that the exact type of stone they’d selected from a small Italian quarry, a creamy white marble with distinctively wiggly veins, “could change wholesale” because neighboring quarries were spitting out black marble and green marble. There was no telling what could come out of the ground. The architects decided to “future proof” the design, to make it so that, however the look of the stone might change, it wouldn’t be obvious or, better still, would look intentional.
But 5,000 tiles is a lot of marble. And they had to finalize the design of the facade before the stone was even cut. So they took photos of the quarry walls. “And we made fake tiles, literally cut five foot by three foot rectangles, out of the picture,” Ramus says. The process of creating the facade, working with the specialists at a company called Front, involved sandwiching sets of sixteen tiles, half an inch thick, between three-by-five-foot sheets of glass, forming a “cassette.” Then the cassettes were stacked into the standard- sized facade panels with which New York City construction crews routinely work. “We called this process ‘productively losing control,’” adds Ramus.
While the complexity of the facade is striking, the complexity of the 129,000-square-foot building’s interior can be dumbfounding. The entry stairway is tucked under the building like a whale’s mouth (and secreted under that is an elevator, the accessible—and branded—Citi Entrance.) Once inside, the immediate draw is an area off to the right intended for free public performances. But the real attractor is the restaurant, Metropolis by Marcus Samuelsson, designed by the Rockwell Group, a welcoming room whose most notable decorative element is on the ceiling, a set of raised, wooden swirls with glowing LED edges. Perhaps they allude to the swirls on the facade, although they could also be there to dampen noise. A narrow terrace at the rear of the restaurant is perfect for facade gazing, with close-up views of PAC NYC’s marble, 1 WTC’s awkward glass fins, and the cool James Carpenter–designed screens that hide the Con Ed substation at the base of 7 WTC, across Vesey Street.
The rest of the building is something of a mystery. One primarily travels by way of long, narrow hallways that circumnavigate the theaters, tightly arranged in a Kaaba-like box in the center. On my first two visits, I was entranced by the weird beauty of the halls, especially the way a sepia glow percolates through the facade. (The effect is created by iron deposits in the marble.) But when I returned to the building to actually attend a performance, I realized that the precise location of the theater entrances—accessible by stairs or elevators—is almost impossible to pinpoint.
This, according to Ramus, is the intent of the design. “A lot of people talk about, ‘Oh, it’s a complicated building, and over time it will reveal itself to you.’ And we felt it really should be the opposite. In this case, we thought that the more people use it the more we would like them to become mystified.”
Mission accomplished. From a production designer’s point of view, the concept is tantalizing: The theaters can be endlessly reconfigured. Walls move. Rows of seats can appear or disappear. There are high powered spiraling lifts that push things up and set them down.
If theater goers are indeed “mystified” on every visit, if every trek to orchestra level or the restroom is an unanticipated adventure, the long-awaited performing arts center is likely to feel like a highbrow escape room.
At a ceremonial opening in September, PAC NYC’s executive director, Khady Kamara and artistic director, Bill Rauch, talked with great enthusiasm about the mutability of the theaters. They can be reconfigured in sixty-two different ways and have “walls that are also doors.” “Which means,” says Ramus, “sixty-two different ways that you might ask people to enter.”
Still, it was disconcerting to be in a familiar type of building—a theater complex—that I couldn’t understand in the most rudimentary way: How do you get from point A to point B?
PAC NYC’s opening events during the third week of September were called Refuge: A Concert Series to Welcome the World. The concept was to establish the arts center as “a point of safety, welcoming in its essence.” (At the time, the opening theme came across as idealistic and maybe a little saccharine. In retrospect—meaning just a few weeks later—it seemed boldly prescient.) Each evening had a different theme. I attended Devotion: Faith as Refuge. It was a lovely show, impeccably produced, featuring a multicultural roster of musicians, including the Yiddish inflected Klezmatics and a Moroccan ensemble called Innov Gnawa. The performers played on a bare stage—which only occasionally moved around—with lush, high-res photos of leaves and flowers projected at mural scale above their heads. The sound was excellent. The audience was receptive. Everything ran like clockwork.
Except for the trip from the lobby to the theater. Figuring out which elevator or set of stairs to take, which way to turn in the hallway, and where the entrance to the theater might be was befuddling for everybody … including the staff. The only way to navigate, as it turns out, was by the door number on your ticket. Everything within the doors was mutable, but the door numbers remain the same.
Ramus compared this wholesale reorganization of a timeworn typology with the work he did on Seattle’s Central Library in the early 2000s as the lead project architect for OMA. When I interviewed him in 2007, he explained to me that the library’s oddball form, an overstuffed zigzag, was a direct representation of the diagram the librarians made of the functions to be housed in the new building. It was, he said, “hyper-rational.” (This, you may recall, was still the blob era, when architects loved to assign irrefutable logic to inexplicable forms.)
And in our recent conversation, he likened the weird organizational structure of the Perelman to Seattle’s “book spiral,” OMA’s re-invention of the way books are organized and located. In Seattle, there’s a four-story ramp, a single path along which all the library’s circulating books are shelved in numerical order according to the Dewey decimal system. The intent is to make the process of locating a library book more intuitive. It’s like a Guggenheim for books, but clunkier.
Anyway, I’m always a little wary of the “hyperrational” argument, whether it’s Silicon Valley’s attempts to optimize taco delivery or an architect’s approach to morphing three theaters into sixty-two. Clearly a trade-off was made; it was technologically doable to give theatrical directors and production designers an astonishing array of creative choices within a limited footprint. In exchange, the audience is forced to tolerate a degree of chaos. But if theatergoers are indeed “mystified” on every visit, if every trek to orchestra level or the restroom is an unanticipated adventure, the long-awaited performing arts center is likely to feel like a highbrow escape room.
The most impressive thing I saw during my evening visit to PAC NYC wasn’t the theater, with all its mechanical wonders, but the World Trade Center itself.
When I showed up for the 8:00 p.m. show, the swath of pavement that is mostly occupied by the memorial was shutting down for the night. Ropes were strung around the perimeter, I assume, to keep people out. But I ducked under one and found a bench that gave me a nicely framed view of 1 WTC, the memorial’s waterfalls, and PAC NYC. The glass panels that cover the bottom floors of the skyscraper light up at night—they were purple—and look much better in the dark than in daylight. The waterfalls, illuminated by white lights, made me think of Las Vegas’s dancing fountains. PAC NYC, by contrast, reflected ambient light and also appeared to glow from within. Even though I knew better, I wanted the patterns on the facade to dance and shimmy.
Sitting there, I remembered that the last time I’d been to the World Trade Center at night was long ago; the Twin Towers were still standing. In the late 1990s, there was a happening nightspot called the Greatest Bar on Earth, located on the 106th floor of the original One World Trade Center. You paid the cover charge at one of the airline ticket desks in the lobby and rode the elevators up. There was a band, dancing, good drinks, and a mix of people including office workers, tourists, and locals. You couldn’t see the view because the windows fogged up, but the bar was, if not the greatest on earth, good enough that it turned the stodgy old World Trade Center into a nightlife destination for New Yorkers.
And that is what I truly hope PAC NYC can do. Depending on the programming—especially the free performances in the lobby—and how inviting the restaurant is when fully operational, how uncomplicated it is to just walk in and grab a meal or a drink, it could bring New Yorkers back to a place that remains a little lost to us. And as lower Manhattan evolves into a more convivial part of town, less finance-driven and more overtly human, the site could become, if not precisely a neighborhood, then a draw for those who live all around it.