Ideas for the Kimmel Center

Coming to an enlivened Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts:

Brahms and bebop, to be sure. But come an hour before the concert and you could do a little rock-climbing on the side of Verizon Hall.

Bring your children to a rooftop playground, or show up at lunchtime to listen to the water falling off the top of Perelman Theater onto vertical gardens.

No one at the Kimmel Center has given the green light to any of these changes, but they were among dozens presented last night at a public forum at the Kimmel. Students from the University of Pennsylvania and University of the Arts formulated three proposals for dramatic changes to Philadelphia's arts center after hearing ideas from the public at four meetings.

The brainstorming session aimed to realize the arts center's original plan to be a seven-day-a-week, 18-hour-a-day generator of street activity - what planners predicted would become another public square.

"The building is not without its challenges or we would not be here tonight," said Harris Steinberg, executive director of PennPraxis, the Penn-related nonprofit planning authority that has cultivated the process along with the Penn Project for Civic Engagement and The Inquirer. "How do we take a building that is largely unfinished and not only finish it but make it a beacon?"

Steinberg said he hoped the Kimmel could become one of the top-five attractions for visitors to the city.

To do that, dramatic and possibly unfeasible gestures would be required, and several flamboyant ideas were floated. Rock-climbing on the side of Verizon Hall would invite liability consequences, planners acknowledged. And water-intrusion, already a problem at the Kimmel, would be further complicated by a glass floor atop the Perelman, from which water would flow down the sides of the Perelman.

But, "In order to enliven the Kimmel, drastic changes must be made," said Bonnie Liu, a Penn undergraduate who was one of about two dozen students who worked on the proposals.

Less ambitious and less expensive themes emerged - providing wireless access, comfortable furniture and places to drink coffee and get a snack.

"Tonight's ideas are preliminary, and are not mutually exclusive," Steinberg said. "This is just a moment in a broader conversation."

All three design proposals called for replacing the black granite cube at the corner of Broad and Spruce Streets with materials that would allow the public to see in, improving signage, and breaking up the heavily bricked Spruce Street side of the building with cafes and other uses by creating a new entrance at 15th and Spruce.

Not part of last night's discussion were proposals to improve the much-criticized acoustic of Verizon Hall, or plans to solve the Kimmel's long-term financial ills.

What will the Kimmel do with these ideas, which were once again brought to the public for reaction last night?

"This is for the board and staff to talk about these concepts and figure out how they mesh with our priorities," said Kimmel chief operating officer Natalye Paquin. (Kimmel president Anne Ewers was unable to attend last night's presentation.)

Most likely, the Kimmel board will hear the proposals at its June meeting. At least one board member, Marjorie O. Rendell, a longtime and well-connected Kimmel supporter, attended last night's meeting.

Paquin said she did not see this process - in which an outside group is weighing in on aspects of a $275 million project that have been deemed unsuccessful - as a sign of failure.

"They're just tinkering around the edges," said Paquin, who did not know whether the original architect, New York's Rafael Viñoly, was aware of the proposed changes. "The signature architecture is still there. You still have the grandeur - the vaulted roof, the rooftop garden, the restaurant."

Many of the ideas recalled the concepts of a previous design for a orchestra hall on the same site by Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates that included electronic signs to tell people what's going on inside the building, as well as ways to make the exterior transparent to show the activity within.

"The outside of the building must let the public see, hear and feel what is happening inside the building," proclaimed one of last night's proposals. "The outside, now seen as foreboding, dull and confusing, should broadcast a sense of excitement and activity onto the street."