Danish architecture studio BIG has released designs for the riverside Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville, USA, which will be covered with a swooping curtain of metal pipes.

A design team consisting of BIG, William Rawn Associates and Hastings Architecture recently released renderings of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center (TPAC).

The design's main feature is a massive metal curtain that, according to BIG, is a reference to a theatre curtain.

BIG is designing the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville

Consisting of bundled aluminium, the curtain will narrow toward the middle of each of the building's facades, revealing expanses of glass that open up the interior to the city, river and the grounds.

"The facade is composed of aluminum tubes bundled like organ pipes or steel chimes, undulating from vertical to horizontal to provide openings and canopies for the audience and performers passing through," said BIG founder Bjarke Ingels.

"The result is like a flowing public pavilion in the park that, as the new home for TPAC, provides the inclusive and inviting character that its program and performances deserve."

It will be wrapped in a banded aluminium curtain

In plan, the structure will be oriented around two large volumes, a grand hall and a dance/opera hall, angled slightly away from each other.

Each will run the length of the site, which steps down from a trussed bridge and the city towards the river.

Ingels said that the design was meant to connect "the old and the new Nashville".

The structure will step down from a viaduct to a river park

Inside the structure, between the two primary volumes, will be a grand lobby with an entrance level with the river. From here, a series of staircases and mezzanines will orient entry into the main performance spaces on either side.

"Designed to be welcoming on all sides, the center is accessible from above and below the bridge, making the atrium lobby a cascading public space for the daily life of the neighborhood," said Ingels.

A lobby between the two largest performance spaces will serve as the entrance

The venue will have four performance spaces in total.

Within the grand Broadway Theater, the audience boxes are described as "floating wood-clad trays" holding the gallery audience in clusters above the floor seating.

TPAC will move from its current location on the other side of the river, near the State Capitol.

"This new center represents the future of the performing arts in Nashville and across our state," said TPAC president and CEO Jennifer Turner.

Nashville has been growing in the last few years, with a boom in development in the city.

The largest theatre will have floating wood-lined boxes

Recently, Goettsch Partners released designs for what would be the city's tallest skyscraper and S9 Architecture converted a former slaughterhouse into a "modern industrial village".

The images are by Bloomimages unless otherwise noted.