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. We came to see that marble glow from the inside, and it did not disappoint. “I am going to sell this hallway to a fashion show,” I heard one of the participants say as we walked down a corridor luminescent from a cliff of amber light.

But the modularity of the theaters themselves really stole the show. As we stood on the balcony, Ramus explained how the conventional approach to flexibility in architecture is to leave the space undesigned: a black or white box. Even though such blankness may technically make anything possible, the cost of building a custom theater inside of that box for just one performance would make it so that that never happened. So, REX designed the hell out of that space, cooking up dozens of very specific configurations and building mechanical equipment into the building itself to allow it to assume a given configuration at the flick of a button. While Ramus explained this strategy, the flat floor of the theater began to move, transforming into a raked amphitheater. At the same time, both its wall and the wall of the adjacent theater (resembling “acoustic guillotines,” noted the architect) disappeared into the ceiling, producing a single, larger space. It took maybe two minutes. I leaned over to a neighboring editor: “This battle station is fully operational.”