Yesterday Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a plan for the first permanent performance space of the Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn. Given that it was designed in part by Frank Gehry, there was reason to anticipate all manner of provocation. Given that it was designed in part by Hugh Hardy, there was reason to expect that it would be stodgy and safe.

In the event, these two architects seem to have met in the middle, and the results, on the basis of the preliminary renderings, are a little more satisfying than we had reason to expect. It is with positive relief that we can report that there is no hint of titanium in sight, nor any fishlike undulating forms. Indeed, the large white cube of the theater’s exterior shows hardly any signs of dislocation or deconstruction, or the sundry earthquakes so dear to contemporary architectural fashion.

Instead, the $35.8 million building (of which $6.2 million will come from the city) revels in a refreshing conceptual simplicity. Despite some irregularities in the massing, and despite the patterned stainless steel shingles that will serve as cladding and the angled panes of glass on the facade, the shape is immediately legible as a cube whose front has been hewn off and replaced with a four-story curtain wall.

The latter will suggest to many viewers the grand entrance of Time Warner Center. Visible from the outside will be a large mural comprising portraits of the Bard and designed by Milton Glaser. The theater itself, which will seat 300, is a still more evocative homage to the Bard, the mainstay of this company. It feels like a cross between the Globe Theater and an ultramodern black box. The flexible seats, set against the bare concrete walls that serve as a concession to contemporary taste, surround the stage on three sides, as do the austere boxes that rise three levels.

The theater is intended to complement Enrique Norten’s Brooklyn Public Library, which, when completed, will stand less than a stone’s throw away, separated by a 38-foot-wide public space. Both are coming into being under the auspices of the BAM Local Development Corporation, which has some radical and far larger ideas about transforming their part of Brooklyn from a largely commercial district that functions from 9-to-5 into a 24-hour destination.

The catalyst here, as so often, is to be culture, and the ultimate consequence of BAM’s success, if it is successful, will be the predictable gentrification of Brooklyn, far beyond the level to which we have seen it gentrified thus far. This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it is not necessarily a good thing either, except in the modest sense that it will clean up and improve what is hardly one of the fairest sections of the borough.

Getting the galleries and nouvelle restaurants, the boutiques and the post-card shops to commit to a lease is the easy part. In order for the project truly to succeed, it will be necessary to strike a balance between the vibrant and chaotic pulse of local life and the more genteel expectations of the well-heeled interlopers who will soon begin to arrive. Such a project has often been attempted in the past, in the Meatpacking District, in SoHo, in the East Village, and abroad. But it is not clear that it has ever succeeded.