Half of the Society of the Four Arts campus is a construction site right now, and the other half is still running exactly as it always has. If you're a member trying to figure out where your Wednesday concert or your grandchild's library story hour actually happens this year, the answer depends on which program you mean, because the $250 million renovation split the season across three separate addresses instead of pausing it.
That split matters this week specifically. According to the Four Arts' own ticketing page, seats for November, December and January programs go on sale to members in September and to the general public in October. This is the month people are locking in a season built around a campus that, for the first time in its history, doesn't have all its programming under one roof.
What's Actually Torn Up
Construction began in May and June of 2026 on two buildings along Royal Palm Way: the Esther B. O'Keeffe Gallery Building and the John E. Rovensky Building. The O'Keeffe currently holds the Gubelmann Auditorium, where concerts, lectures and film screenings usually happen, along with the Four Arts' rotating gallery exhibitions. The Rovensky has housed the administrative offices and, until now, the Children's Library.
The project is being led by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners, and it's funded through the Four Arts' Centennial Campaign, a fundraising effort that covers both construction and the organization's long-term endowment. The timeline runs about 18 months, putting completion in late 2027. Attorney Harvey Oyer, who worked on the project's approvals, put the reason plainly to local reporters: except for the King Library, most of the campus was originally built for other purposes and had simply been "stitched together" over the decades to serve an arts organization it was never designed to hold.
That history explains why this renovation looks less like a facelift and more like a rebuild. The O'Keeffe footprint grows from about 20,000 square feet to nearly 31,000. The Rovensky gets a new three-story addition on its north side. The Children's Library, which has shared an entrance with administrative offices since the 1990s, finally gets its own dedicated door and nearly 50 percent more room.
The East Side Never Closed
Here's the part that gets lost in the headlines about a quarter-billion-dollar construction project: the east half of the ten-acre campus never stopped operating. The King Library, the Dixon Education Building, the Demonstration Garden and the Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden are all open on their normal schedules. If your routine is a Tuesday morning walk through the sculpture garden or an afternoon at the King Library's collection of more than 75,000 books and periodicals, nothing about your visit has changed.
What did change is everything that used to happen inside the O'Keeffe and Rovensky buildings specifically. That's the piece worth mapping out before you buy tickets for a program you assume is happening on campus.
Where Your Program Actually Lives This Season
| Program type | Usual home | This season |
|---|---|---|
| Sanda & Jeremiah Lambert Concert Series | Gubelmann Auditorium (O'Keeffe) | Royal Poinciana Chapel or the Dixon Education Building's Johnson Hall |
| O'Keeffe Speakers Series | Gubelmann Auditorium (O'Keeffe) | Royal Poinciana Chapel |
| Film screenings and Met Opera live broadcasts | Gubelmann Auditorium (O'Keeffe) | Palm Beach Day Academy, Seaview Avenue |
| Children's Library | Rovensky, 2nd floor | Dixon Education Building, 2nd floor, with regular programming continuing in the Hulitar Garden |
| King Library, Demonstration Garden, sculpture garden | East campus | Unchanged, open as usual |
Two community partners made this possible. Royal Poinciana Chapel, at 60 Cocoanut Row, is now hosting concerts and lectures that would normally fill the Gubelmann Auditorium. Palm Beach Day Academy on Seaview Avenue has taken on the film and recorded-performance slate, including the Met Opera broadcasts that used to draw a regular Wednesday afternoon crowd to the O'Keeffe building.
If you've been a member for a while, the practical difference is a drive instead of a walk. The campus at 100 Four Arts Plaza sits inside easy walking distance for a lot of Midtown Palm Beach residents. Royal Poinciana Chapel and Palm Beach Day Academy are a few minutes further by car, which is a small change but a real one if your Wednesday evening habit was built around parking once and staying put for a lecture, a concert and a coffee afterward.
How the Campus Got Permission to Do This
There's a zoning wrinkle behind this project that's easy to miss but explains why it's happening now rather than a decade ago. Palm Beach didn't have a dedicated zoning category for cultural institutions until 2024, when the town approved a new Cultural Institution designation. Before that, organizations like the Four Arts and the Flagler Museum were technically zoned as single-family residential, which meant any meaningful expansion required variance after variance. The two institutions pushed for the change together, and the new category is what let the Four Arts move from a patchwork of approvals to an actual construction timeline.
That's not a footnote for real estate purposes. It's a rare example of a decades-old institution getting room to grow because the town's rulebook finally matched what the building was actually being used for.
A Realistic Wednesday This Fall
Picture a Four Arts member with a ticket to a Lambert Series concert in November. The habit for years has been: park near the campus, walk in through the O'Keeffe, take a seat in the Gubelmann Auditorium. This season, that same ticket might route to the Royal Poinciana Chapel instead, a few blocks north on Cocoanut Row, with its own parking and its own rhythm for finding a seat before the doors close.
Meanwhile, a family with young kids headed to Children's Library story time skips the O'Keeffe entirely and heads to the Dixon Education Building, where the library now operates out of the second floor while the garden programming continues outside in Hulitar Garden exactly as before.
Neither trip is complicated once you know where you're going. The problem only shows up if you assume the whole campus is either fully open or fully closed, when the truth is that four programs are running out of four different rooms this year, two of them off-site entirely.
What Doesn't Change
The east campus stays open through the full 18 months. The King Library keeps its regular hours. The Demonstration Garden keeps its posted schedule. And when the O'Keeffe and Rovensky buildings reopen in late 2027, the campus will have a larger children's library, an updated Gubelmann Auditorium with a new seating layout, and gallery space closer to 31,000 square feet instead of 20,000.
For members who've watched the campus operate the same way for years, this season is a temporary rerouting, not a reduction. Buy your tickets this month knowing which address they point to, and the rest of the season looks a lot like it always has, just spread across a few more doors than usual.
If a campus that's been part of daily life on the island since 1936 is the kind of detail that makes you think about what living here year-round actually looks like, the Greg Forest Group knows this stretch of Royal Palm Way and the neighborhoods around it well. Request a private market consultation whenever you're ready to talk about it.
