“When you match the building’s revelations with the Open Curriculum and Brown’s approach to crafting your own academic vision, giving people agency in what they want to do, you get this really beautiful, unexpected combination,” said Avery Willis Hoffman, artistic director of the Brown Arts Institute.

As part of the collaborative, multidisciplinary planning process for The Lindemann, located in the University’s Perelman Arts District, the design team met weekly with students, faculty, artists and administrators, all of whom brought a myriad of visions to the table for the multi-genre performance space that would fulfill complex and diverse needs.

“The fact that Brown committed to the cost impact of getting everyone together on a weekly basis was phenomenal,” said Adam Chizmar, a REX project manager. “Maybe even made it possible.”

Ramus said there were two goals for the building’s design.

“One was this extraordinarily transformable high-performance main hall that would be exceptional for orchestra, for recital, for theater, for dance, for media — which is a new animal,” Ramus said. “And then there’s that glass clerestory that cuts through the building, the whole intent of which was to allow the contents to bleed out and for the University to invade.” 

Barton, a member of Brown’s Class of 1978 who concentrated in semiotics, has walked Brown’s paths for decades, and speaks poetically about the “porosity” of the campus, the way it is built into the larger Providence community. In particular, he loves the way The Lindemann’s glass “bridge” allows passersby to feel one with what’s happening inside the institution.

To ensure the safe movement of the seating, glass walls, balconies, flooring and the sail-like acoustic reflector panels anchored end-to-end across the ceiling, the building relies on a pully system, making The Lindemann one of the most transformative theater spaces in the world, it is also one of the safest, Ramus said. 

Looking upward in the main hall, the building’s functional components are held in place and moved on what looks to be an old train track.

“Because the gantries are moving, for instance, we had to be able to create these drawbridges that continue the egress routes,” Ramus said. “We could have invented them or we could just use the drawbridges that are on the back of fire trucks.”

In the cutting-edge design, the main floor of The Lindemann sits above street level and the seats in the building’s small amphitheater take on the appearance of gentle waves to visitors climbing the building’s steps or entering the elevator. The main floor and lobby of the building is distinguished by its glass perimeter, the transparency allowing visitors to make peace with the rather dramatic rise and girth of its fluted, almost gill-like aluminum siding, masking an inner layer of porous material that “breathes” to protect the building from wet New England weather. 

The Lindemann was named in recognition of a generous gift from Frayda B. Lindemann, a Brown University trustee, and her late husband George Lindemann Sr. Since it opened in Fall 2023, the building has housed a range of productions as artists and performers “wrap their head around the level of flexibility we have,” Brown Senior Technical Director Shawn Tavares said. IGNITE, the BAI’s multi-year series of creative activations, have manifested as residencies, lectures and exhibitions throughout the center’s first year.

Hoffman said the team is working to encourage creators to move toward producing art that incorporates what The Lindemann can do, rather than just presenting performances that were worked out elsewhere. 

“Being in the building definitely affected [the] programmatic vision,” Hoffman said.

Another priority is to deepen Brown’s ties with the Providence arts community, Hoffman said. There’s a workforce-training aspect to the Lindemann and its complexities in the Brown Art Institute’s initiative, ArtsCrew. Members, whether seasoned professionals or students making their first foray into the space, receive training where necessary and are paid for their work. 

“If anything, you need more people when you’re moving a many-tonned piece of glass around,” Tavares said.

So far, the programming at The Lindemann has included appearances by such world-renowned performers as Itzhak Perlman, Carrie Mae Weems, William Kentridge and many others, alongside student performances by the Brown University Orchestra. 

With additional collaborations with the Rhode Island School of Design and the Trinity Repertory Company already in progress, and others that are drawing on at least seven other disciplines at Brown, the BAI and The Lindemann are helping to realize Brown’s commitment to making the University an arts “laboratory,” one that will be the first choice for prospective students interested in a fully integrated arts program.

Hoffman loves the idea that the work on display at The Lindemann might also be messy and unbounded in the best possible sense and stresses the importance of failure in the creative process.

“There’s so much pressure to have it all worked out,” Hoffman said. “Failures are much more interesting. Being able to encourage people to positively fail and to experiment and innovate and incubate — these are all the kinds of words that we’ve been using.”     

Read the full story from the Brown Alumni Magazine.