Brown Performing Arts Center: White Hope or White Elephant? – Architecture Critic Morgan

Saturday, July 01, 2023

Will Morgan, Architecture Critic

 

Brown University’s long-anticipated Lindemann Performing Arts Center is nearly finished and will open in October. The dazzling 118,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art theatre building marks the school’s championing of interdisciplinary artistic expression. With the realization of this multi-functional landmark, Brown announces its aspiration “to be a worldwide destination for students who want to fully integrate performing, visual, and literary arts into a complete liberal arts education.” Avery Willis Hoffman, the Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute, allows how “transformative architectural forms” will inspire “boundary-pushing programmatic response and artistic visioning.” Read about the Lindemann Family HERE.

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The Lindemann is a remarkable achievement in terms of its facilities. The bulk of the white box on Angell Street packages a dramatic and “radically flexible” performance space that has movable walls and five “radically different stage types.” The 40-foot-tall hall can seat an audience of over 500 for concerts by the 100-member Brown Symphony Orchestra, or it can be made smaller for opera, dance, or theatre.  Acoustically, this giant, column-less “black box” can be fine-tuned, even during a performance. In short, the PAC has all the mechanical wizardly and performance-related toys one could ever wish for.

 

    

 

Starchitect Joshua Ramos, principal of the firm REX, and his team deserve special commendation for inserting the art center into an almost impossibly constricted site, may have been influenced by the initial donor, Ronald O. Perelman. University Architect Craig Barton’s disingenuously claims that “input from existing or potential donors is not a consideration in architect selection for projects at Brown” (never mind that REX also designed the Perelman Arts Center, a similar boxy container at the World Trade Center). Consequently, having shoehorned this new structure between the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts and the Department of History, half of the PAC’s mass is underground. Thus, the rehearsal theatres and the windowless practice rooms are reached through claustrophobic hallways–more fallout shelter than passageway to musical study.

 

    

There are some unnecessarily gloomy spaces above ground, also dictated by the response to the cramped site. The sloping ceiling of the “gathering space” at the front, exterior entrance hovers too low, giving the visitor the uncomfortable feeling the building is about to fall and crush them. It is difficult to imagine many students hanging out here. Similarly, another miscalculation of spontaneous student gathering, one rarely sees anyone hanging about the grassy steps at the adjacent Granoff Center.

 

 

The main lobby is also something of a downer. This gravity-defying cantilever is the most dramatic feature of the PAC’s exterior, yet it has an oppressively low ceiling supported by a forest of columns. Ramos claims that a low lobby is a necessary prelude to fully experiencing the great open hall. This is not so much a repudiation of the grand lobbies of the Paris Opera, say, or Lincoln Center, as the disguise of a complicated structural solution necessitated by the difficult location.   

 

 

The lobby is an extension of the one uplifting element of the PCA, the so-called Clearstory (a pun on the architectural term clerestory?). Visually, this extended-out walkway acts like a plinth, or base, for the fluted cube and gives the white box a stately presence. Compared to the constricted lobby, the cantilevered walkway perched above Angell Street is the place for patrons to stroll, to see, and be seen. Ramos assigns glazing an important role in connecting the PAC with the rest of the Brown, declaring that “all intellectual campus life will bleed into the building.” This glassed-in promenade is the best part of the building, but it, too, has a dark underneath side, suitable for skateboarding, as a makeshift shelter for the homeless, and a place where, as Michelangelo argued against dark spaces at St. Peter’s, nuns could be raped.

 

 

Little about the Lindemann is warm or exciting; rather, it comes across as a cold, corporate space. It says something about Brown’s inability to stand up to fat cats, even unsavory donors, while saying nothing of the soul and spirit of Brown itself. As for College Hill, Ramos declares that his building is “non-contextual,” but alleges that the fluting motif continues the “depth” of the older buildings in Brown’s neighborhood. The concave vertical flutes, however, do the same job as their classical columnar antecedents, creating shadow lines, here mitigating the otherwise overbearing mass of the cube. In of itself, the ridged, extruded aluminum rain screen is a triumph, as it reflects changes of both color and demeanor, depending upon the weather, the time of day, or the season.

 

 

Aside from the perverse elements, and particularly the ill-advised and near-impossible-to-overcome site, everyone hopes that the Performing Arts Center lives up to its promises as an incubator of the best in the arts for Brown. The real test will be to see how students respond to the building and how it is used in the next decade or two.

 

EDITOR'S NOTE: A reference that Perelman dictated aspects of design has been modified.

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