Fully Operational

“The problem with ‘genericism’ is it costs so much operating budget to change the space, it may as well be a strait-jacket,” said Joshua Ramus, principal at REX, seconds before the walls and floor began to move.

Ramus addressed a cross-section of the architecture press arrayed on a balcony overlooking a not-yet-finished theater in the not-yet-finished Perelman Performing Arts Center. All the participants wore dorky white helmets and fluorescent yellow vests, while Ramus arrived in all black: boots, coat, scarf, even the construction helmet. “Must be a Vader day,” someone quipped. The gaggle of editors and writers, diligently herded by their PR sherpas, came for a chance to peek inside the $500 million marble box wedged between the Freedom Tower and Calatrava’s Oculus, one of the final pieces of the World Trade Center site. The already widely published (and, for that matter, already award-winning) building, clad in nearly five thousand panels of marble sliced so thin that the sun shines through them, is, evidently, a riff on Gordon Bunshaft’s Beinecke Library at Yale…