I admit it: I love Lincoln Center. When I lived in New York it was easily one of my favorite sites in the city, and not just because I went to so many concerts at Avery Fisher Hall. Having studied music, I loved the centripetal nature of the complex itself, the way the competitive energies of Juilliard, the Met, the ballet, and all of their cutthroat counterparts infuse the place with that “You Are Here” buzz that makes New York New York. And the various plazas make it easy to linger.
Only gradually did I learn that many people consider Lincoln Center an architectural problem, especially those who remember its graceless displacement of an older community. In his Times review of the new Alice Tully Hall, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff writes,
Lincoln Center has never had the best karma. Conceived as part of a 1950s-era slum-clearance program, the immense superblock required the demolition of an entire neighborhood of dilapidated tenements and brownstones. When it was completed, the watered-down classicism of its travertine buildings seemed to capture all the anxieties of the cold war period, its confused stylistic references camouflaging a kind of emptiness.
Well, in my callow youth I experienced Lincoln Center as a monument of mid-century modernism — particularly Avery Fisher, where the exterior glass walls lift you up above Broadway as soon as you present your ticket, and return you to that vantage point each time you emerge from the auditorium. Great music followed immediately by some of New York’s more soothing nocturnal views, darkening over the course of the evening, is not my idea of emptiness.
So I’m eager to lay eyes on Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s renovation of Tully, across 65th Street in the bowels of the Juilliard School. My old buddy Jeff Lunden toured the new space and interviewed Elizabeth Diller on NPR’s Weekend Edition yesterday, describing, in effect, the firm’s efforts to make Tully do what Avery Fisher already does. The architect talked about integrating the lobby with the street — using a high wall of glass, just as the firm integrated Boston’s ICA with Boston Harbor — and throwing the new limestone bar open to the public. Fascinatingly, the architects also borrow from the ICA in their use of a single suspended room with an edited sight line: in this case, a Juilliard dance studio (the bright square beneath the fang, below).
Hiroko Masuike, NYT
I do have my doubts about the new, red-orange LEDs in the walls of the hall itself, behind a sweeping new veneer that was carved, Jeff reports, “from a single log of African Moab wood.” Diller says the walls now “exude a kind of blush” at the “moment at which the murmur just dies down” before a concert, but sources tell me the effect is more electronic than biological.
Still, what fun to read architecture and music reviews of the same hall in the same week: Anthony Tommasini loves the new acoustics. I can’t wait to see what DS+R do with the next installments of the Lincoln Center project, breaking down more of the forbidding elevations around Juilliard, making 65th St. less of a wasteland, and, on a more dubious note, sinking the Columbus Ave. taxi drop-off underground. The latter would seem to make the plaza less accessible, not more, and will make scenes like Cher’s arrival at the opera in Moonstruck sadly obsolete.
