Exclusive: David Rockwell Gives a Tour of Perelman Performing Arts Center

Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) has opened at the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. PAC NYC (251 Fulton Street) is a dynamic new home for the arts, serving audiences and the creative sector through flexible venues enabling the facility to embrace wide-ranging artistic programs. The inaugural year will feature commissions, world premieres, co-productions, and collaborative work across theater, dance, music, opera, film and more. The vision for PAC NYC began when then Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his team worked to ensure the plan for rebuilding the World Trade Center site included a performing arts center.

BroadwayWorld has your exclusive look inside PAC NYC with designer David Rockwell below!

The inaugural year programming will feature commissions, world premieres, partnerships, festivals and co-productions. The artistic programs will range from World Premieres of Laurence Fishburne’s one- man tour-de-force play Like They Do in The Movies, to a fabulous reimagining of CATS set in the competitions of New York City’s Ballroom culture, to new multi-disciplinary work, and more. 

The inaugural season showcases the unparalleled flexibility of three performing arts venues inside PAC NYC: the John E. Zuccotti Theater (seating up to 450 people), the Mike Nichols Theater (seating up to 250) and the Doris Duke Foundation Theater (seating up to 99). The venues can be used individually or combined (total capacity up to 950 seats) with configurations that include theater-in-the-round, end stage, thrust and traverse, to accommodate artistic innovation that can engage and delight audiences in new ways at every visit.

Named for businessman, philanthropist and benefactor Ronald O. Perelman, the Perelman Performing Arts Center is a 138-foot-tall, cube-shaped building with radically flexible capabilities designed by the architecture firm REX, led by founding principal Joshua Ramus. REX’s design, created in collaboration with executive architect Davis Brody Bond, theater consultant Charcoalblue and acoustician Threshold Acoustics, is conceived for an artistic program that will have vast and varied needs to serve New York’s extraordinarily diverse arts community. The building is wrapped in nearly 5,000 half-inch thick marble tiles which have been book matched to create a symmetrical pattern, which is identical on all four sides of the building. The marble façade allows light to radiate in during the day and glow out during the evening. David Rockwell and his architecture and design firm Rockwell Group designed the interior of the lobby and restaurant with a dynamic, glowing ceiling visible from the street to create an inviting entry experience. The lobby's restaurant by chef Marcus Samuelsson, along with the bar and outdoor terrace, offers a new gathering space for the Lower Manhattan community.