After two years of work at a price tag of £3.5 million, Dublin's Project Arts Centre will show off its renovated space for the first time this week.
The centre's artistic director, Ms Kathy McArdle, insists that behind its dazzling new facade of glass, steel and concrete painted electric blue, the place's old spirit remains. "The Project," she says, "is a subversive, innovative, radical place where artists can make challenging work."
Still, how much subversion is permissible to an organisation which expects an annual turnover in the region of £800,000-£900,000, part of which will come from such deeply unsubversive sources as bar profits? What about the £500,000 grant this year from the Arts Council? And how much radicalism will be acceptable to sponsors?
Ms McArdle says that "the boundaries between the margin and the mainstream are blurring all the time".
Since moving out of a long-established home in Temple Bar's East Essex Street in 1997, the centre has occupied premises in Henry Place, north of the Liffey.
Next month the Project will cross back over the river, although it returns to a building which bears almost no resemblance to what formerly stood there.
The Project Arts Centre first started 34 years ago as a voluntary, artist-led co-operative founded by four visual artists - John Behan, Michael Kane, John Kelly and Charles Cullen - and Colm O Briain, who later became director of the Arts Council.
From the very start, the centre had a reputation for iconoclastic innovation and for offering alternatives to mainstream cultural activity. Having been housed in various locations around the city, in 1974 the Project found a permanent home in a former printing works at 39 East Essex Street.
The centre's roll-call of names from the past includes actors who have found international fame such as Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne, directors Neil Jordan and Peter Sheridan, U2 and Rough Magic Theatre Company.
The former premises were small and had facilities that were often primitive. After a serious fire in 1984, for example, a two-storey area was never restored but became known simply as "the burnt-out space".
That space is now a large and meticulously equipped gallery 41/2 metres high. Its ceiling is studded with 16 "downstands", each of which is capable of bearing up to two tonnes of weight.
Next to the gallery is the auditorium in which the Project's many and varied performances always took place. This space will now be known as "The Cube", with between 75 and 90 seats or room for 120 people standing.
The area is now more shallow, as the back wall has been moved forward to create a small patio garden at the rear. That little detail is typical of the differences between the old Project and its new incarnation, designed by Shay Cleary Architects.
The freshly-created upper floors built on to the old structure's roof, for example, contain not just a second, multi-purpose auditorium capable of holding up to 500 people but also a generously spacious foyer and bar, as well as a roof garden.
The entrance lobby, occupying a space which used to serve simultaneously as gallery and ticket office, today rises two storeys high and looks like foyers found in many of the capital's new hotels.
Behind the scenes, facilities and fittings share similarly high standards. The old Project's primitive lavatories were tucked next to actors' changing rooms: sounds from one could be heard in the other. That inelegant situation has gone. The new centre even contains such extras as a laundry room for cleaning costumes.
Both the exhibition and performance areas in the building will be fully equipped with the latest in sound, lighting, projection and media technology. Seventy-five per cent of the refurbishment funds came from the European Regional Development Fund with the balance provided by the Arts Council, the Department of the Environment and Temple Bar Properties.
While the structural improvements were undeniably necessary and will greatly benefit artists, it would be understandable if the character of the Project now changed as completely as has its appearance.
The Project officially reopens on June 10th with a show of work by nine international artists.