Tennessee Performing Arts Center

The Tennessee Performing Arts Center is a new 307,000-square-foot cultural campus planned for Nashville's East Bank along the Cumberland River, beside the John Siegenthaler Pedestrian Bridge in the Central Waterfront district. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) with William Rawn Associates and Hastings Architecture, the building gathers four performance venues: a grand Broadway hall, a dedicated dance and opera hall, a flexible black box theater and an intimate cabaret, along with permanent classrooms and rehearsal studios. A reflective facade of undulating aluminum tubes lifts like a theater curtain to reveal the activity within, and a rooftop terrace frames sweeping views of the river and the downtown skyline, which Ingels describes as a visual extension of Broadway across the water. Conceived as the cultural anchor of the East Bank redevelopment, the roughly $600 million campus replaces TPAC's longtime downtown home and is funded through a public-private partnership pairing state funding with privately raised capital, on Metro-owned land under a long-term ground lease.