The interior of the Kings Theater in Brooklyn recalls the Palace of Versailles and Paris Opera House.

The Metropolitan Opera delights with its whimsical starburst chandeliers.

In New York, we expect world-class performance spaces to be works of art themselves. Enter the Shed, the city’s new cultural institution at Hudson Yards in Manhattan.

The Shed opens today, and to describe it I turned to my colleague Michael Cooper, who first covered its development as a City Hall reporter in the early 2000s. He now covers classical music and dance for The Times.

The building, a $475 million “flexible art space” (and feat of architectural engineering), has a small theater, galleries and a large performance space “that sits under an enormous silvery puffer jacket of shell,” Mr. Cooper said.

But what makes the Shed really stand out is its telescoping shell, which “can roll back and forth on rails,” he said. “When extended, it doubles the footprint of the Shed, creating a huge indoor space.”