Billionaire Ron Perelman is adding star power to the board of the performing arts center at the World Trade Center.
Barbra Streisand is the new chair of the planned Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center. Perelman previously co-founded the Women’s Heart Alliance with Streisand.
The singer did not attend a media event Thursday with Perelman and others that detailed the design and programs for the $243 million project. Sources said she wanted the press to focus on the project.
“She is so committed and takes on a project and grabs hold of it,” Perelman said Thursday at 7 World Trade Center. She is “dedicated to this artistic community of the performing arts board and will lead us into the next millennium.”
In June, Perelman, the former chairman of the Carnegie Center, announced a $75 million gift toward the stalled project, which is one of the final pieces of the reinvented WTC site.
Additional funds are still needed to complete the center, which is slated to open in 2020. Perelman’s donation revived plans for the project, which also received a $99 million grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.
The Perelman center is intended to become a premier high-tech venue that will host the Tribeca Film Festival as well as produce and present dance, theater, chamber music and even yoga classes.
The building was also designed to be incredibly flexible. Every visit will not only provide a different experience but patrons will wonder how the feat was accomplished.
“What excites us with all the flexibility is that the more the public uses the building, the less they understand how it all happens,” said Joshua Prince-Ramus, whose Brooklyn-based architecture firm REX was chosen last February after a competition. An earlier design by Frank Gehry was scrapped.
The building will be a 90,000-square-foot grey-white cube that sits on a higher podium to accommodate underground World Trade Center infrastructure. It will be offset between One and eventually Two World Trade Center, with its slit entry and archway facing the memorial pools.
The box itself will have a simple exterior of thinly veined white marble from the same quarry used for the Jefferson Memorial and US Supreme Court, Prince-Ramus said during an exclusive preview of the space with The Post.
The marble is translucent and sandwiched between glass pieces. During the day, it will glow a welcoming amber on the insides. In the evenings, the outside will also project moving shadows as patrons and artists pass through the corridors.
The interiors will be simple and made of durable concrete, steel and wood which, along with numerous movable elements, will ensure the building can meet its mission of being a beehive of activity from morning into the night well into the future.
Along with Streisand, other board members include: developer Larry Silverstein; Ric Clark, chairman of Brookfield Property Group; Ari Emanuel, co-CEO of entertainment and sports agency William Morris Endeavor; and director Stephen Daldry. Artistic directors include David Lan and Julie Taymor.
“Before 9/11 on a weekday night or weekend you could roll a bowling ball down Wall Street or walk in the middle of Wall Street – it was dark, vacant and unexciting and unappealing,” Silverstein said. “It has totally changed. Tripling the population downtown here has made an immense difference.”
Center producer Jenny Gersten, who was most recently executive director of the Friends of the High Line, earlier said: “The PAC will be a birthplace and … a showplace and a creative hub where work is generated. Artists will be creating all day long and even the stages will be populated all day long.”
These stages could also be used by the community for activities such as yoga classes, rehearsal spaces or music lessons.
Guests will enter through the south facade via a wide dramatic staircase where people can sit and congregate. The first floor public foyer space will include a café that can also be used for small performances as well as gathering places.
The second floor will be reserved for performers and will have dressing rooms and rehearsal studios.
“The performers are at the heart of the building in a place of respect with natural light [from the glowing amber walls],” explained Prince-Ramus.
Upstairs, on the third “play” floor, is where the magic happens. The performance spaces will have “guillotine” walls and baffles around the edges, allowing the artistic director to create 11 different sized spaces out of three basic stages and a rehearsal hall.
The three performance spaces — with seating capacity for 99, 250 and 499 people — can be reconfigured to accommodate 1,200 people at the push of some buttons.
The space will also be the among the most technologically advanced, enabling connections, cultural exchanges and even joint performances between local artists and organizations around the world, according to Gersten.
“It will be bursting at the seams with creative energy but be sited next to a commemorative element,” said Prince-Ramus with a nod to the memorial. “It is very simple, very elegant and very pure and that simple envelope embraces all the creative vectors happening in the interior.”
