Night view of the planned Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts at Brown University, seen from the walkway between Angell and Olive streets on the East Side.

PROVIDENCE For years, they were a small group with a big plan — to build an interdisciplinary arts center at Brown University that would blur the boundaries separating traditional art forms while fostering collaboration among actors, artists, writers and musicians.

Now, that vision is about to become a reality.

Just as many Rhode Islanders were rushing home for the start of the Memorial Day Weekend, school officials were breaking ground on the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, a $40-million arts center designed by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Situated on a busy stretch of Angell Street and due to be completed in early 2011, the center will house a 200-seat recital hall, a recording studio and an art gallery, among other facilities.

“It’s a special moment,” said Richard Fishman, a longtime Brown professor who will serve as the center’s first director. “I was still fairly new to Brown when they first started talking about building an interdisciplinary arts center on campus. That was nearly 40 years ago.”

Organized around a series of split-level studios and rehearsal spaces, the arts center will have a number of unusual features. On the outside, the building will be sheathed in a mix of glass and zinc, a weather-resistant material that will be applied in raised, pleat-like panels. Besides adding some visual buzz to the building’s exterior, the panels will taper from one end of the building to the other. The effect, which seems appropriate for an arts center, suggests a series of half-raised theater curtains.

The building’s role as a kind of creative Petri dish is also reflected in its modular design. Rather than a single all-encompassing structure, the center is divided into smaller segments that hint at the many activities — everything from theater rehearsals to musical performances to multimedia exhibits — that will take place inside. The result looks a bit like a pile of high-tech building blocks.

Still, the building’s biggest surprise may be on the inside.

Thanks to some nifty engineering, the three-story arts center will actually have six different floor levels. The reason: a unique design that divides each of the three main floor plates in half, then offsets them at half-story intervals. The move, which sounds a lot more complicated than it is, will allow artists on one side of the building to peer into two adjacent spaces — one above and one below.

“It’s really a brilliant solution,” says Richard Fishman. “On the one hand, the artists who use the center can focus on whatever they’re doing, whether it’s rehearsing a play or recording a piece of music. On other hand, they’re always aware of what other people are doing.”

Certainly, finding the arts center won’t be a problem.

Unlike many of Brown’s older buildings, which are tucked away behind ivy-covered walls, the center will occupy a high-profile location directly behind the Brown Office Building (better known as the home of the Brown Bookstore) and near one of the city’s busiest crossroads: Angell and Thayer streets. The one-acre site was formerly the home of the East Side Service Center.

In recent years, this area has seen a flurry Brown-related projects.

The Sidney E. Frank Hall for Life Sciences, a sprawling $95-million research complex that dwarfs almost everything around it, opened three years ago on nearby Meeting Street. The university has also spent millions of dollars developing “The Walk,” a major pedestrian walkway that connects Brown’s main College Hill campus with its one-time women’s school, Pembroke College.

The arts center continues this trend. Rather than facing Angell Street, as one might expect, the front of the building faces The Walk. Meanwhile, a smaller entrance, this one leading directly to the center’s 200-seat recital hall, will be at the southeast corner, facing Angell Street.

“We really spent a lot of time thinking about how the project would affect both the university and the wider community,” Fishman said. “In the end, I think we came up with a plan that has something for everyone. Having a building dedicated to creative communication and cross-pollination at the center of the campus is, I think, a great symbolic statement by the university. At the same time, the building is designed to be very visually open and welcoming. It’s not meant to be a fortress.”

According to Fishman, the idea for the arts center first surfaced in 1970s, about the same time the school adopted its so-called New Curriculum. Developed by a coalition of students and faculty members, the New Curriculum was designed to break down barriers between disciplines and encourage students to take classes outside traditional majors. Likewise, the arts center was envisioned as a place where traditional boundaries — between theater and music, say — would dissolve.

“It was all very idealistic, in keeping with the times,” Fishman recalled.

Fishman said the project finally began to gain momentum about 10 years ago. Though Brown already has a number of galleries, dance studios and other arts-related facilities, there was no place where all the arts could come together under one roof. Meanwhile, in the world outside academia, artistic collaborations were becoming more widespread, especially among younger artists.

“In recent years, the whole idea of crossing boundaries and combining different art forms has become more mainstream,” Fishman said. “Today, the artist who specializes in a single art form throughout an entire career is something of a rarity. Artists are really becoming multi-taskers.”

Still, there was a problem: Who would design the project?

Fishman said the university drew up a list of about 20 architects, “including some pretty big-name people.” Eventually, the list was winnowed to five, then one.

“The proposal we got from Diller Scofidio Renfro was clearly the best,” Fishman said. “It was obvious that they spent a lot of time thinking about the purpose of the building, which is to foster interaction between artists. The idea of creating a series of multi-level spaces, so that you’re always aware of the activity going on around you, was by far the best solution to the problem.”

If the name Diller Scofidio + Renfro rings a bell, there’s a reason: the same firm, led by architects Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro, designed Boston’s striking new Institute of Contemporary Art (another building that seeks to break down barriers between different art forms). The firm is also in charge of the ongoing renovation and expansion of New York’s Lincoln Center, including landmarks such as Alice Tully Hall and the Julliard School. Husband-and-wife architects Diller and Scofidio are also working artists and winners of a 1999 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.

(Meanwhile, hiring high-profile architects to design major cultural buildings is becoming something of habit on the East Side. Last fall, Brown’s College Hill neighbor, the Rhode Island School of Design, opened the Chace Center, a sleek, $45-million gallery and classroom complex designed by noted Spanish architect Rafael Moneo. Just up the hill, Brown’s starkly modernist Albert and Vera List Art Center was designed by another architectural heavyweight, Philip Johnson.)

Though Brown’s arts center will be considerably smaller than the ICA, it will accommodate a similar range of activities. According to the project’s fact sheet, the 35,000-square-foot building will house an art gallery, a film-screening room, a recording studio, a multimedia lab and three production studios. Other facilities will include an outdoor amphitheater and a “physical media lab” that will explore links between the arts and technology.

Originally dubbed the Creative Arts Center, the project was recently renamed the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. The move honors the center’s two main donors: Brooklyn-based businessman and Brown trustee Martin J. Granoff and his wife Perry.

bvansicl@projo.com