Skip over navigation

An Arts Neighborhood

The Arts and Transit Project will create a new home for the Lewis Center for the Arts. Said President Shirley M. Tilghman, the center enables the University "not only to expand its programs in the creative and performing arts, but to establish itself as a global leader in the quality of its offerings and in their integration into a broader liberal arts education."

Neighborhood Plan; click to enlarge
The neighborhood plan by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners (click diagram to view larger version).

The neighborhood also will support academic programs in theater and dance and the Department of Music (which also will maintain its presence in the Woolworth Center) with new teaching, rehearsal and administrative spaces.

Performance venues will include a black box theater, an experimental media studio, a dance studio, a large music rehearsal room and a performance hall with a fly loft and orchestra pit.

Audiences already drawn to the area by the McCarter and Berlind theaters will find themselves on familiar yet expansive new ground. The arts will be much more apparent in the surroundings, from students on their way to classes, faculty leading sessions outdoors and patrons on their way to many different kinds of performances.

entrance to Berlind Theatre

“... I don’t believe there is another university in the country which has committed itself so concretely to the view of intellectual life as deficient without serious attention to the arts. Not just for the aspiring professional artist: not limited to an amiable pastime available in separate enclaves; but an assumption that art is an intellectual pursuit — struck, perhaps, by lightning bolts of inspiration; inoperable without the power of the imagination, but a pursuit deeper and much more profound than even the talent and genius of its purveyors. Princeton University is a natural habitat for such a pursuit.”
Toni Morrison, the Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus

student dance performance
horn section at orchestra practice
student exhibition gallery