PROVIDENCE – Brown University today will hold a groundbreaking for its new Creative Arts Center – a glassy, modern building resembling stacked boxes of varying sizes – that will house a recital hall and outdoor amphitheater, along with assorted laboratories and production studios.

The ceremonial groundbreaking for the $40 million project is scheduled for 3:15 p.m. Construction will begin in June and the building should open by early 2011, the university announced this week.

In renderings by New York-based architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the front of the 35,000-square-foot building is clad in glass curtain wall. With four floors, the building has a split-level design – with one half the building’s floors higher than the other half.

In a statement on the firm’s Web site, the architects wrote that the floor plates are staggered with a “structured misalignment.” Designing the building so adjacent floors aren’t on the same level has allowed for “a sectional opportunity, allowing each floor to interface two others conjoined by a shear glass wall.”

On Angell Street, the modern building will serve as a bridge between “Brown’s historic campus and the Pembroke campus,” according to the university.

Dietrich Neumann, the Royce Family Professor for History of Modern Architecture and Urban Studies at Brown University, said the new building will be a “great improvement” for the area.

“It has an innovative façade that creates interest and invites the passersby to look or go inside,” Nuemann said in an e-mail message yesterday. “While it is not ‘contextual’ in the sense of using materials already in play on that stretch of Angell Street – brick, wood and concrete – it has a clear commitment to defining the streetscape on Angell Street and then addressing the new Quadrangle with its main façade an a seating and viewing area.”

In announcing the groundbreaking, Brown said fundraising among the Brown alumni community will pay “the full project amount.”

Martin J. Granoff, a member of the Brown Corporation, led the fundraising effort. “The Creative Arts Center will be phenomenal for Brown,” Granoff said in a statement. “It will bring together the best and brightest students, taught by an extraordinary faculty, and give them a unique architectural environment designed for collaboration, experimentation and excellence in all of the arts.”

Brown President Ruth J. Simmons said, “I am eager to see the innovative research, creative experimentation and fresh approaches to collaboration that will arise from the new spaces and programs provided by the Creative Arts Center.”

Along with a 200-seat recital hall and 35mm film screening room, the building will have a recording studio, multimedia lab, technical shop and physical media lab where students can experiment with sensors, robotics and physical computing. An art gallery and classrooms are also planned.

Richard Fishman, a visual art professor and the director of the Creative Arts Center, said the building will “transform” the interaction between artistic disciplines. “The facility will provide the diverse groups of arts practitioners at Brown with a space specifically designed to encourage the exploration of cross-disciplinary collaboration, integration of new media and the proliferation of artistic research and production.”