The design team for the proposed Metropolitan Kansas City Performing Arts Center painted a detailed picture of the iconic building's look and feel during a Monday luncheon at The Central Exchange.

The center, estimated to cost $326 million to build and maintain, is at least eight years and a few design changes in the making.

Moshe Safdie, a Boston architect who designed the center's shell-shaped performing halls, told the overflow lunch crowd that he doesn't expect any significant tweaks to the project.

"When you have time with design, it's like wine," Safdie said. "It gets better with time. Except now it's drinkable. It is time to drink it."

The center's organizers are in the midst of a capital campaign to raise $45 million for the project by Feb. 1. That would increase committed financing to about $273.5 million -- $52.5 million short of the $326 million goal -- and pave the way for a groundbreaking in the fall near 16th Street and Broadway.

To date, center backers have raised about $231 million, said Jan Kreamer, a Performing Arts Center board member who leads the capital campaign.

"We're on track," she told the audience at The Central Exchange in Downtown.

Safdie is one part of a world-renowned design team that provided some details Monday on the performing arts center's progress. The other members are theater and lighting designer Richard Pilbrow of Theatre Projects Consultants and Yasuhisa Toyota of Tokyo-based Nagata Acoustics.

All three said the performing arts center's halls will set the standard for audience intimacy, acoustics and sight lines. In October, center organizers announced that the halls each would house about 1,600 seats. Earlier plans called for a 1,400-seat orchestra hall and a 2,200-seat hall for ballet and opera.

The proposed center also would include a multi-use banquet facility called Celebration Hall that could accommodate about 400 people, organizers said in October.

"Intimacy, we think, is the most important word to describe any building that is related to live performance," Pilbrow said Monday. "We are incredibly lucky to have a smaller seat count."

Sitting atop a bluff near Downtown's Kansas City Convention Center, the proposed building would have two shell-shaped halls wrapped in stainless steel and limestone-colored panels. The halls' lobbies and entryways would be connected by a glass curtain suspended on steel cables that would face south.

Asked by an audience member what kind of theme he was going for with his design, Safdie was intentionally vague. Some architects try to tell people what they should think, he said, but his designs are open to interpretation.

© Kansas City Area Development Council