While the Market’s closure seemed to some like a sign that Harvard students would be left with the American Repertory Theater (ART) as the only professional group in the area, Carr had a different idea.

He wanted to reopen the Market Theater in a brand new, technically sophisticated space—at a total cost of $21 million.

In addition to a 320-seat theater, the new building will house a theater-themed café and the Carr Foundation’s headquarters, as well as low-cost office space for non-profits, which Carr says is much needed in a city facing a space crunch where all property is extremely expensive.

“It creates a whole building full of synergy,” he says.

The building will also be Cambridge’s first “green building,” according to Carr, and will be heated with no fossil fuels. Instead, it uses a geothermic process where water is pumped up from below ground; in winter, heat is extracted from the water and released into the building, and in summer, the heat is removed from the building and absorbed into the water.

Carr says he hopes construction on the new Market complex will begin in early spring; the plans by Guy Grassi, who also designed the original theater, are essentially complete, and all that remains is approval by Cambridge.

Home of the Great Carr

Carr entered the technology boom early in 1987, when he co-founded telecommunications equipment manufacturer Boston Technology with an MIT engineer.

In 1995, Carr began to fuse his interests in technology with his passion for human rights, founding a company called Africa Online which tried to bring the Internet to developing countries, later including Mexico and China.

To help with this, he purchased Prodigy, one of the first commercially successful Internet services, from IBM in 1996.

In 1999, he sold his stock in Internet giant Prodigy Inc.—of which he had been CEO—before the dot-com industry took a tumble.

He explains that his business enterprises were a gateway to his desire to work in human rights and the arts.

“What was driving me was to be able to keep pursuing what interests me,” Carr says. “It was more of getting to a position of saying, ‘I can do this full-time.’”

Meanwhile, he “dabbled in some things,” pursuing two of his other passions by co-founding the Boston Book Review and learning film-making.

Carr says he needs a combination of intellectual challenge and pragmatic action to be content—something which he says he sees in Harvard students, with whom he has interacted through the Market Theater and through his involvement on the board of directors of the ART.