WORKac’s 19,000-square-foot cultural center in Inwood is New York City’s first immigrant-centered performing arts institution, and the largest Latino-owned and operated performing arts institution in New York State. Founded by Dominican theater-maker Mino Lora, The People’s Theatre spent eighteen years staging work in borrowed venues across the city. The building gives the company its first permanent home.

The design turns the institution’s daily life outward: rehearsals, classes, and performances happen behind storefront glass along West 206th Street, so the ordinary workings of the building become part of the public life of the block. On the street, a perforated metal canopy marks the entrance, nodding to the marquees of Broadway further downtown, its pattern drawn from the tile motif that runs throughout the interior.

At the entrance is the “Rampatorium”, a single continuous ramp that brings everyone into the building the same way, its shifts in level creating informal benches for gathering. Color runs through every space, drawn from Inwood’s own streetscape: bodega storefronts, street art, and the neighborhood’s Art Deco lineage, a “vernacular modernism” for the Global South.

The Mainstage Theatre, designed in collaboration with Theatre and acoustics consultant Charcoalblue, is a “box within a box”: the floor floats on springs, the ceiling hangs on springs, and the walls stand structurally independent from the surrounding building. The completed theater accommodates 99–208 patrons with 25 seating configurations.