“The Kimmel Center is a wonderful idea,” says Philadelphia Inquirer Music Critic Peter Dobrin. “But they opened before they were ready.” Indeed, the second, classical, opening night on December 15 (December 14 catered more to the pop crowd) was chaotic. The heat wasn’t working, and the concert hall, on which international media had been invited to pass judgment, wasn’t completed. (Nor had the orchestra musicians had sufficient time to adjust to it.)

There are other unresolved issues. Resident groups such as the Philadelphia Opera say they cannot afford the Kimmel’s high rents; the public spaces in the Raphael Viñoly designed structure remain virtually empty. “You don’t walk into the plaza and feel welcome,” says Dobrin. “The gift shop went out of business, the restaurant was supposed to be a destination and it’s not. Sometimes it feels like a ghost town.”

Price is nonetheless optimistic, and points to the visiting international artists who have passed through Kimmel’s doors and the 20-story luxury condominium that is being built next door. “That wouldn’t have been conceived of in this part of Philadelphia before the Kimmel Center opened.”

GRAND NATIONAL THEATRE, BEIJING, CHINA.

If the arts building boom is explainable on a case-by-case basis in the West, it is more than a little puzzling in Asia.According to Opera Japonica, the City of Tokyo alone has 62 opera venues, 25 with over 1,000 seats, few of them ever full. Nonetheless, three new ones have popped up since the late 1990s. In China, plans for new halls seem to hatch daily, and the hunger for western classical music explains it only partly. The Hong Kong government’s plan for the $5.1 billion West Kowloon cultural project, for example, doesn’t even include a concert hall, which the Hong Kong Philharmonic desperately needs. Small wonder that Music Director Edo de Waart has openly called the project “ridiculous . . . the completely wrong way to do things.”

The biggest construction project in central Beijing since the mausoleum of Mao Zedong in 1977, work on the Grand National Theatre began in the late 1990s with the demolition of thousands of homes, restaurants, offices, and workshops at a vast 37-acre site to the west of Tiananmen Square. Dubbed “the egg” for its dome shape, the facility’s raison d’être is a complete mystery to all but Communist Party officials; even the city’s performing arts professionals can’t figure it out. Designed by French architect Paul Andreu (whose domeshaped terminal at Charles DeGaulle airport collapsed in May 2004), the Grand National is said to have a 2,500-seat opera house, a 2,000-seat concert hall, and an experimental theater. The entire structure has to be lower in elevation than the Great Hall of the People, and so much of it lies below sea level. Andreu’s design calls for it to be surrounded by 50,000 tons of water in an artificial lake along the Yongding River. By one dissenting local architect’s calculation, the average distance to an exit from any seat in the dome’s auditoriums is 250 meters. “I would advise concertgoers to take a running test before attending a performance there,” Professor Alfred Peng of Tsinghuya University is quoted as saying in the South China Morning Post. “Failure to do so could cost one’s life, be it in a fire or in a flood.”

Illogical design and prohibitive expense aside, the real question behind this particular bricks and mortar (and glass and titanium) arts structure is, who is it for? Beijing already has ample performance space, large and small. What local opera company, dance or theater troupe, or orchestra needs a new venue? Will the average Chinese citizen be able to afford the ticket prices? The project remains shrouded in mystery.

LINCOLN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
NEW YORK, NEW YORK.

This great granddaddy of arts-center-as-urban-renewer, now in its fifth decade, is en route to a major upgrade. Earliest estimates, in 1999, for the total cost were around $1.5 billion. (That was in the pre-9/11 economy, though the sum total may still come to that one day.) The current plan is to work (and fund raise) across the 18-acre, 12-constituent complex in stages, the first one being a redo of the 65th Street side between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Estimated cost of that is $500 million, with completion anticipated by the Center’s 50th-anniversary year, in 2009. After that, plans include remodeling Avery Fisher Hall, expanding the Juilliard School, and updating Alice Tully Hall—and that’s just for starters.

Still, and vast in scope as it is, Lincoln Center is but one of numerous performing arts structures in physical upgrade mode. CEO Reynold Levy attributes the building boom to a number of factors, including civic pride, an

increasingly affluent society “and therefore the availability of money to be raised,” and recognition of culture’s economic impact on society. But he also emphasizes that the arts are not alone, pointing to the “explosion of sports stadiums, new and elaborate college dormitories and libraries, and recreation centers.”

SYMPHONY CENTER, ATLANTA, GEORGIA.

For these projects do have a way of taking on lives of their own. Plans for the Atlanta Symphony’s new home when first announced (also in 1999), called for the renovation of an old church, at a cost of $113 million. Fast forward to 2006, and the orchestra has a $300 million symphony center on the front burner. Will they make it? “We’re arguing the case of audience outreach, of civic pride, of economic impact,” says CEO Allison Vulgamore. With not quite a third of the monies raised—and in a town where the arts take a back seat to

“attractions” such as a new aquarium and a retrofitted baseball stadium—Vulgamore and her fund-raisers have a steep climb ahead of them. “Orchestras are civic leaders,” she argues with more than a hint of determination in her voice. “They always have been. Atlanta doesn’t have a historic legacy of the arts. We’re building one in real time.”

Susan Elliott is a journalist and editor of MusicalAmerica.com.