Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter, Vice President Joe Biden, Kennedy Center Chairman David M. Rubenstein, Kennedy Center Trustee Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, Steven Holl of Steven Holl Architects. Photo by Scott Suchman.

Vice President Joe Biden helped the president and chairman of the Kennedy Center ceremonially break ground today on a $100 million expansion of the Northwest D.C. performing arts center.

The project, expected to be completed in May 2017, will add approximately 60,000 square feet of additional space for rehearsal, performances and education, and will better connect the Kennedy Center with the Potomac River. Today’s event also marks the 50th anniversary of the original groundbreaking.

“What we are starting today is not just a new building but a transformation of the Kennedy Center into a performing arts center ready for the artist and patron needs of the 21st century,” Kennedy Center Chairman David M. Rubenstein, who contributed $50 million to the project, said in his remarks.

Rendering by Steven Holl Architects via Kennedy Center

President Deborah F. Rutter said the project “dramatically advances our relationships with visitors, audiences, and artists, fully realizing the mission of the Kennedy Center. That mission, to which we aspire every day, demands that the Kennedy Center be at the center of cultural life in our nation; it expects that we reach as broadly and as deeply as we can to bring the very best of the arts to the citizens of this great country, and it compels us to honor the implicit joy that defines art.”

“This new vision is bound to inspire imagination and creativity and awaken in scores of young people a yearning and talent many don’t know resides in them,” Biden said of the project, according to the Post.