Sarasota Performing Arts Center

The Sarasota Performing Arts Center is the proposed new home for touring Broadway, concerts and large-scale performance on Sarasota's bayfront, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Sarasota's Sweet Sparkman Architects as architect of record. The current Concept 2.0 places a low, luminous white pavilion at ground level just south of the 10th Street boat basin inside The Bay park, preserving view corridors across North Tamiami Trail and lifting the site gently from the waterfront for resilience. Roughly 110,500 square feet under roof would hold a 2,200-seat main theater, a flexible 250 to 300 seat second venue, a learning lab, a donor and community lounge, and a 16,000-square-foot indoor and outdoor lobby, approached along a palm-lined promenade beneath a fine steel canopy. Parking would move into structures and below grade, returning most of the Van Wezel surface lot to parkland. The project is a public-private partnership between the City of Sarasota and the Sarasota Performing Arts Foundation.