Brown University has shared photos to go along with the inauguration of its new REX/Joshua Ramus-designed Lindemann Performing Arts Center tomorrow in Providence, Rhode Island. 

The building supports both performance and instruction on campus with an emphasis on creating new forms of collaboration inside a 101,000-square-foot container of flexibly configurable spaces. It combines with the twelve-year-old Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts next door to create the new Ronald O. Perelman Arts District, which is accessible from Brown’s main The Walk pedestrian corridor and provides the city with an added cultural venue as the university’s footprint within it expands.

An extruding fluted aluminum rain screen facade gives the shoe box-like structure its complexity. The design includes a main hall that can be reconfigured five ways to accommodate between 70 and 530 people, depending on need; multipurpose William Riley Hall rehearsal space that doubles as another 135-seat performance venue; 50-seat black-box theater called The Performance Lab; a 98-seat studio called The Movement Lab; four practice rooms; storage; and a cantilevering lobby.

The project was begun in 2017 after the university launched its Brown Arts Initiative (later renamed the Brown Arts Institute or BAI), a comprehensive plan to further cultivate a transdisciplinary exchange between faculty and students in an elevation of the role of the arts as the traditional center of Brown’s educational experience.

REX founding principal Joshua Ramus called the design a “mystery box” in his recent New York Times profile. (He also spoke about the project at length during our 2019 Archinect Sessions interview.)

The firm will use this as a compliment to the Perelman Performing Arts Center that opened to wide acclaim in Manhattan in September. Brown has also recently announced a new Life Sciences Building in the Jewelry District designed by Ballinger and TenBerke, whose new all-electric CLT Brook Street Residence Halls project also opened this semester. 

Celebrations of the new Lindemann building are being held all day tomorrow, October 21, on campus. More information about the inauguration festivities can be found here.