A $70 million effort to a more beautiful Mann Center is underway. But it’s about more than just rock shows and orchestra concerts.

Quietly over the last few years, Mann Center leaders have been wooing donors and drawing up plans for a kind of relaunch timed to the center’s 50th anniversary and the nation’s 250th.

Now the Mann is entering the homestretch of a $70 million campaign to pay for it all, and has revealed the details of its grand plan: a renovated campus, a lineup of ambitious artistic projects for 2026, and the creation of vehicles for sharing the history of the summer music festival in Fairmount Park.

So far, the Mann has raised $56 million, and “we’re on course to get to $70 million in this public phase,” said Catherine M. Cahill, president and CEO of the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. “We’ve done our homework. We believe we are able to find the difference and it will be successful.”

After the close of the season in October, the Mann will begin the work of creating a roomier campus and constructing new or expanded structures wrought in a nature-inspired wood and stone aesthetic. Plans by EwingCole include a new main entry canopy and a plaza three times the size of the current one. An exterior section of the Mann’s angular open-air concert shed is to be transformed into a 4,900-square-foot LED screen animated with video and kinetic artwork. Digital pillars and new wayfinding cues will be installed throughout the outdoor venue, which will also get new lighting and landscaping.

To promote a social-media presence, the Mann will perch its own version of the “Hollywood” sign spelling out theMann. in a spot where visitors can take selfies.

The boundaries of the Mann’s grounds will be expanded slightly to accommodate the larger plaza. Construction is expected to be finished for a reopening in May of 2026.

The Mann opened as the summer home of the Philadelphia Orchestra during another national celebration, the 1976 Bicentennial. It was originally called the Robin Hood Dell West and was renamed the Mann Music Center in 1979 for philanthropist Fredric R. Mann before taking on its current name in 1998.

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The orchestra’s presence in Fairmount Park goes back even further — to 1930, when its musicians, then without the 52-week contract they have today, began performing as the Robin Hood Dell Orchestra on the other side of the Schuylkill, in East Fairmount Park.

But although the Mann added nonclassical acts decades ago and continued to update facilities, it has not attained a secure financial underpinning. The current campaign aims to correct that, at least somewhat. An endowment piece to the campaign will add $9 million to the nest egg, bringing it to $15 million.

Cash reserves are being doubled, to $4 million.

Some of the building projects are already complete, like a backstage renovation of the main pavilion and the new permanent Highmark Skyline Stage at the top of the hill. About a half dozen new or substantially altered buildings are to take shape by this time next year.

Part of the goal of the project is raising consciousness around the importance of the Mann. Its history is not oft-told, said Cahill, despite a list of visiting artists that includes classical musicians like pianist Van Cliburn, conductors Yevgeny Svetlanov and Klaus Tennstedt, contralto Marian Anderson (as narrator), pianist/conductor Leonard Bernstein, and dozens of singers and soloists in their prime.

On the nonclassical side, Cleo Laine, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, Manhattan Transfer, Henry Mancini, John Denver, and Peter, Paul, and Mary have all visited.

This history will be brought to the fore in a Mann Music Hall of Fame, a digital display in the new Welcome Center building which allows visitors to hear dozens of oral histories from figures like conductor Zubin Mehta, who made his American debut at the Robin Hood Dell in 1960 at age 24.

“People come for an event or a concert, but they may not know the incredible legacy of the artists that have been here,” says Cahill. “It blows your mind every time you go through the list. It’s an incredible story.”

Much of that Mann story rests on the scholarship of music archivist and historian Jack McCarthy, who is producing a 420-ish-page book on the history of the Dell and Mann due this fall.

Next summer, while Philadelphia and the rest of the country are pondering the promise of 1776, the Mann will focus on artistic projects marking three other dates: 1876, 1976, and 2026.

Fairmount Park was the site of the Centennial Exposition of 1876, which is the inspiration for a new multimedia work by composer Peter Boyer and librettist Mark Campbell. “They have pulled incredible stories that have now been set to music of people who came and what they experienced,” said Cahill. The piece, A Hundred Years On, will be given its world premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Crossing choir.

The Mann will remember 1976 by recreating (exactly or mostly) its opening night program from June 14, 1976, with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

“Everybody’s going to have to come in tie dyes and bell bottoms and all the rest of it,” said Cahill.

Present day comes into focus with The Four Seasons Reimagined, a collaboration with BalletX that will be a fusion of dance, music by composer Dan Deacon, and “immersive set design.”

All of what is to emerge next summer — the highlighting of a substantial artistic history, improving the visitor experience, girding finances — is part of a yearslong effort by the Mann to be viewed as a substantial artistic citizen worthy of the same kind of support as the city’s other major arts institutions.

The Mann has evolved from being just a summer stage for orchestra and pop shows to a larger and more ambitious arts center that has commissioned new works; hosted events like the recent HBCU festival; built a summer orchestral training camp for fifth to 12th graders; and launched a year-round after-school arts program and a workforce development program feeding into the music industry.

Said Cahill: “We’re not just doing concerts with the orchestra and rock shows. We’re much more than that now. At the end of the day, if the Mann can be considered a key institutional cultural beacon and solution to some of the issues that we are facing where we sit, then amen.”