The last decade has done a number on Philadelphia’s legacy cultural institutions.
Venerable names that we assumed would be around forever — the Philadelphia History Museum, the University of the Arts, and, most recently, the Academy of Natural Sciences — have been winking out like dying stars, casualties of the pandemic, changing leisure habits, funding cuts, and Philadelphia’s peculiar dearth of deep-pocketed patrons.
The city’s surviving legacy organizations are now working overtime to increase their visibility and bring in new audiences with community events and crowd-pleasing programs.
Nothing captures the public imagination quite like a new building, especially one with an address on Broad Street, the long, straight boulevard branded the Avenue of the Arts. After 19 years of trying, the Philadelphia Ballet will formally open its eye-catching new home just north of the Vine Street Expressway with a gala on Sept. 17.
In times like these, any new arts building in Philadelphia is cause for jubilation, whatever its flaws.
Although the Philadelphia Ballet Center for Dance is primarily a working building that provides the company with modern practice studios and support services, it also allows the ballet to operate its own public theater for the first time in its 63-year history. Shelly Power, the group’s CEO, rightly views the 150-seat space as a major opportunity for community-building outreach.
So, it’s frustrating to see the ballet repeat the architectural mistakes of an earlier generation of cultural venues. With its glass-enclosed rooftop studio and pleated metal facade, the building initially dazzles with shimmer and light, especially at night. But it quickly becomes clear that this is just another hermetic box that walls itself off and sabotages its own efforts to engage the public.
The absence of street-level windows on North Broad Street is particularly galling given the corridor’s spectacular revival over the last decade, including hundreds of apartments, the Met concert hall and the award-winning Honeysuckle restaurant.
Rising to new heights
Designed by Varenhorst, a Philadelphia firm that toggles between high-end suburban homes and downtown apartments, the $45 million building is, in some ways, everything a big city ballet could want. The five-story structure does a great job at integrating the soaring, light-filled practice studios for elite dancers, with a dedicated classroom wing for the ballet’s school. Dancers are so energized by the scale of the new space, Power said, they can “jump higher.”
While the majestic Academy of Music will remain the ballet’s main performance space, the stripped-down, black box theater gives the company the opportunity to experiment with more intimately scaled works. And because the performance area is the same size as the Academy stage, the ballet can also do dress rehearsals there.
Having access to such an assortment of quality spaces promises to lift the ballet to new creative heights. Although the corps regularly ranks among America’s 10 best classical ballet companies, its dancers and school became itinerant after financial troubles forced the company to sell its old home at Broad and Washington in 1992. For many years, the school was housed in one location, dancers practiced in another, and administrators worked out of a third space. The lack of a stable home made it more challenging to woo top talent.
In 2007, the ballet purchased two small buildings at the corner of Wood Street with the goal of consolidating its operations under one roof. The Avenue of the Arts was just taking shape, and the location promised to give the northern stretch — always a bit of an afterthought — a marquee destination. As a longtime occupant of The Inquirer’s former North Broad Street home — the big white Tower of Truth (now the police headquarters) — I couldn’t wait to see human activity return to those sad blocks above Vine Street.
It’s an understatement to say that things didn’t go smoothly.
The design and the architects changed several times. The ballet, which, it is worth pointing out, received no city money for this important project, even lost its financing at one point. Architect Stephen Varenhorst, who signed on around 2016, deserves credit for sticking with the ballet through its many ups and downs.
Maybe because the ballet was space-deprived for so long, his design was driven by a desire to make sure the company had the best of everything. Along with four large practice studios, the building is outfitted with a sprawling costume department, workshops for storing and dyeing dance shoes, a music room, and a generously equipped wellness spa.
To pack all this onto the deep, narrow site, Varenhorst put the ballet’s front door on Wood Street. Architects often prefer to locate the main entrance on the long side of a building because it’s easier to organize the interior circulation.
That arrangement definitely makes things more convenient for dancers and visitors, since Wood Street now effectively serves as an automobile drop-off. But it badly shortchanges the pedestrian experience on North Broad Street.
A daunting facade
Early in the design process, the ballet decided it would install the black box theater at the Broad Street end of the building. As the name suggests, black box theaters have no windows. That meant the most important facade, the one facing the Avenue of the Arts, would be a blank wall.
To enliven the solid, four-story expanse, Varenhorst has covered the surface with a crimped, stainless-steel screen. The treatment is meant to suggest a theater curtain. Unfortunately, it’s a closed one.
Varenhorst and the ballet have gone to great lengths to dress up the metal scrim. The stainless steel is good quality, manufactured by Zahner, the same firm that did Frank Gehry’s metalwork. The pleats are etched with ghostly figures of the corps’ dancers and perforated with pinholes that sparkle with fairy lights at night. If you crane your neck, you might be able to see dancers moving around the glass-walled studio on the top floor.
It’s about as good as a blank wall gets, but it’s still a daunting cliff.
To activate the large expanse of metal, the ballet clamped a digital sign onto the corner. The dance company plans to use it to advertise upcoming shows and display videos of dancers. We could just as easily stare down at our phones to get the same content.
What’s most disappointing about the design is that the ballet is not the first venue on the Avenue of the Arts to treat Broad Street as an afterthought. Although the Kimmel Center can at least claim a Broad Street entrance, its heavy brick facade was similarly unfriendly, especially when no performances were taking place. Those solid walls were one reason the Kimmel floundered in its early years. It took a series of interventions — a cafe, restaurant, and, yes, a digital sign — to make the large building feel more alive.
Moved by the same reasoning, the Wilma Theater also retrofitted its building to create a ground-floor cafe on Broad Street.
Arts administrators always promise us lively sidewalks when they announce a new building, yet there seems to be something in Philadelphia’s architectural DNA that produces the opposite result.
Take the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History on Sixth Street. Although it faces Independence Mall, a symbol of democratic openness, that facade is sheathed in opaque glass. Its main entrance is around the corner on Market Street.
Ironically, the three buildings — the ballet, Kimmel, and Weitzman — all follow the same format: Each features a transparent glass structure at the top, far from the madding crowd.
Why couldn’t the ballet have reversed this arrangement and put its black box theater on the upper level? That way, a glass-fronted practice studio could have faced Broad Street. Even if Wood Street remained the main entrance, the transparency would have enlivened the ground floor and made the ballet a visible presence in the city. Instead, the blank wall reinforces the idea that ballet is an elite form of culture.
Power and Varenhorst told me they briefly considered, then rejected, the arrangement because the company’s dancers would have objected to being put on display during stressful rehearsals.
But who says that a ground-floor studio could be used only by the ballet’s professional dancers? The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Manhattan, which opened a six-story practice facility and school in 2005, got around that problem by making its transparent ground-floor studio a space for public classes. Watching the dance students go through their moves there has become so popular, Alvin Ailey installed a bench outside.
Like other cultural leaders, Power is now focused on using the building to build a community of dedicated ballet supporters, much as Anthony Roth Costanzo has done at Opera Philadelphia. She wants to hold public events with dancers on Wood Street and is looking into making Carlton Street a pedestrian walkway.
“Our challenge is this: How do we activate the building?” she said.
Good question. Unfortunately, the ballet missed a big opportunity to show, as well as tell, what’s going on in the Center for Dance. In sacrificing public urbanism for its own private needs, the ballet does everyone a disservice.
