Long the most impressive interior space in New York, the Park Avenue Armory—in the midst of a sensitive rehab by Herzog & de Meuron, allowing us to see anew some of the best woodwork in town—is now even greater. It has been playing host to excellent performances, exhibitions, lectures, and all-out art installations. Being in a space so sumptuous and perfectly restored with virtually anything is a fantastic experience—as close to Rome as many of us might get, and by subway.

The play includes a snippet from the future as well: an imagined version of her funeral, which she asked Mr. Wilson to create. “Marina told me a lot of stories about her parents and family situations, the loves in her life and the sorrows,” said Mr. Wilson. “I constructed them into a visual poem about her life. I did it in my way.”

The glimmer of gold leaf is a sure giveaway to painstaking preservation as we expect it to be: involving experts in arcane crafts, scaffolding in the highest places and scores of Q-tips deployed in bringing back the original as exactly as possible… but go to the Park Avenue Armory, another landmark transformed into a performance and event space, to see a different approach to preservation. This one allows “age lines”—traces of alterations from different eras, and even the memory of past damage—to show through in the pursuit of something more vibrant than a one-dimensional re-creation. Park Avenue Armory asks us to pay closer attention to a space where history is still alive and under way.

When the ambitious refurbishing of the landmark Park Avenue Armory is complete, New York will have an alternative arts center unlike any in the world: a national treasure that carefully weaves together historical and new design while encompassing industrial austerity and Belle Époque excess.

Hollywood and the mechanics of film fantasy are a primary source of his art. This is particularly true of the recent works that tend to be big-budget projects, now that the market has finally discovered him. The Armory installation, his biggest so far, is a compendium of signature ingredients: violence, humor, sex, impotence, appetite, degradation, art history, politics and pop culture. The piece is based on two intersecting elements: the 1937 Disney animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and the suburban home of Mr. McCarthy’s childhood.

On Wednesday night, in the first of nine performances (three have been added to the initial run by popular demand), the armory presented another Stockhausen spectacular: “Oktophonie,” a 70-minute, electronic work in which the audience sits in the midst of eight speakers, which were placed as if in the corners of a cube. An audience of 375 (the maximum) sat in a circle as an eight-channel digital recording of “Oktophonie” was played, with Kathinka Pasveer, the sound projectionist, at the control board in the middle of the audience. The visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, in keeping with Stockhausen’s request that “Oktophonie” be experienced as it might be in outer space, turned the Drill Hall into a sort of lunar landscape.