- March 16, 2025
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In the five months since the architects at Renzo Piano Building Workshop revealed their preliminary concept for a new Sarasota Performing Arts Center, much has changed.
The main theater capacity has grown from 2,500 to 2,700 seats.
The four-building complex has been trimmed to two with an option for a third — a 700-seat theater — in the future.
The long-standing best guess estimate of $375 million for the project is now a more firm, $407 million, factoring inflation projections.
And, at least for now, a worst-case scenario assumption that Sarasota County will not contribute its tax increment financing revenues, collected in a two-block area surrounding The Bay, to cover 25% of the cost.
What hasn’t changed is the plan to relocate the site for the new theater complex from inside The Bay park to its eastern edge along North Tamiami Trail to become a northern extension of the park’s Cultural District, as well as a covered cultural promenade to extend from the south end of the park at Boulevard of the Arts to the north end beyond 10th Street.
On Tuesday morning, the Sarasota Performing Arts Foundation appeared before a City Commission workshop and later in the day before a crowd of approximately 200 residents and other interested parties at town hall-style meeting at Municipal Auditorium, just a few hundred yards south of the proposed SPAC site.
The morning meeting provided a detailed update of the facility, including the cost, in advance of a March vote on an implementation agreement between the city and the Foundation. That vote marks the next crucial step in the joint venture effort dating back to 2018 to, as part of the Bay Park Master Plan, bring a larger and more resilient primary performing arts facility to replace the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall.
The Genoa, Italy-based Renzo Piano addressed that resiliency by moving the location of the facility as far from Sarasota Bay as possible and crafting a design that elevates the buildings well above the FEMA-identified flood levels.
“Our architects, because of their vision of resiliency and sustainability, have lifted these buildings off the ground,” Sarasota Performing Arts Foundation President and CEO Tonia Castroverde Moskalenko said at the town hall meeting. “These buildings will be 20 feet off the ground. There will be there will be activation at the ground level, but the idea is to protect them from the elements and from severe weather.”
The refined drawings are still very preliminary, Castroverde Moskalenko said, as there remains potential movement in the building locations. In September 2024, Renzo Piano presented a four-building campus of, from south to north, a multipurpose building, a 700-seat theater, the main lobby and, finally, the main theater. Cost realities trimmed the plan back to two structures with the multipurpose building remaining in its planned location above the 10th Street Canal and the main theater on a portion of the boat launch lot at Centennial Park, which is being incorporated into The Bay park.
The multipurpose building, which serves as the primary point of entry, and main theater stand above open public space connected by a raised walkway. Much has changed, said Jerry Sparkman of the project’s architect of record Sweet Sparkman, but not everything, including the symmetry between the preferred location with the rest of the Cultural District, whose row of historic cultural buildings is being preserved as part of The Bay Phase 2.
“When the (Renzo) Piano team saw what's going on here, what they began to see was a cultural axis, the relationship of original buildings that could form something significant for the city,” Sparkman said.
Approval of the implementation agreement will allow Renzo Piano to begin the next design phase. Mark Carroll, Renzo Piano’s project partner-in-charge of the project, told the City Commission via Zoom Tuesday morning that final design remains two years away.
That design could move the main theater to south of the canal, in part because of design challenges to accommodate tractor-trailer show loading intermixing with boat trailers. To avoid that, the architects are considering a ramp taking trucks over the Centennial Park lot to the first floor of the theater 20 feet above.
Moving the theater appears unlikely, though, because view corridor restrictions from the condo towers across Tamiami Trail would limit its height — specifically the fly loft above the stage — unless the first floor elevation is lowered to accommodate the viewshed.
That, though, defeats the flood resiliency intent.
With that uncertainty remaining, though, Castroverde Moskalenko told town hall attendees changes could still be made.
“I do want to stress underscore that all of the renderings and all of the concept designs are flexible because we are still studying all of the site locations,” she said.
