A self-transforming building may sound like a 21st-century fantasy, but ancient Rome, just before the reign of Julius Caesar, took a crack at constructing one. A pair of back-to-back theaters presented plays in the morning and then rotated to form a single amphitheater for gladiator battles in the afternoon. The first-century historian Pliny the Elder tells us that “the Roman people themselves, as they spun round in their seats, were in far greater peril than the gladiators.” It’s taken a couple thousand years to work out the kinks, but in three days a trio of intimate, radically transformable theaters debuts in New York, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC).
Located just north of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, PAC NYC is a monumental cube of translucent Portuguese marble. Concealed within it are three performance spaces, which can be configured separately or together in at least 60 different arrangements, a flexibility that opens up all kinds of possibilities for plays, dance, music, opera, film, and more. The design of the center has been a long time coming. The first tentative steps were taken in 2004 with the appointment of Frank Gehry as architect, but the site—at the time it was called the Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center (W.T.C.)—was bedeviled by logistical and political complexities that led to 10 years of delays.
