So what can I tell you about the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro refashioning of Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center? It's still a construction site the official re-opening isn't until February but I previewed some substantially completed portions last week with Liz Diller and Charles Renfro.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, from the day it opened Lincoln Center needed to knit itself better into the streetscape of Manhattan. It was in effect designed not to. It was conceived as an “island of culture", a Beaux Art notion of city planning arts buildings on a platform isolated from the grimy realities around them, like the great museums surrounded by rolling lawns in Cleveland or Kansas City, or the Philadelphia Museum on its Acropolis at the end of Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Lincoln Center was also being built in what was then a pretty rough neighborhood, the place where West Side Story was filmed. It's a miracle they didn't have a drawbridge and a moat.
This is why the larger Lincoln Center renovation scheme that Diller, Scofidio + Renfro are carrying out, which won't be complete until 2009/10, involves redesigning the approach to the Center's main fountain plaza to put a vehicular road below street level and make access from the Broadway side easier for mere pedestrians...
Inside the lobby they also designed eat your heart out Zaha Hadid a long, aerodynamic bar. (It's in the lower right corner of the photo below and the in foreground of the photo up top.) To make the whole space more of a social destination the lobby caf/bar will be open not only to ticket holders but to anybody between 8 AM and 11 PM. Diller says the idea was “to make good on the 'public-ness' of the public space."
Inside the performing space itself there was one particularly nice touch. In addition to the customary house lights from above, an LED lighting system is embedded in resin panels just behind the wood veneer walls. It allows the walls to glow very gently from within. Before every performance those embedded lights will rise and then dim, a wrap-around equivalent of the raising of the chandelier to mark the start of a performance at the Metropolitan Opera. The auditorium is plainly going to be a much warmer place than it was before the renovation. In conversation Diller likes to use a lot of anatomical and biological analogies to explain her firm's work nipples, skin. And there's something about the experience of this warm, dim enclosure that's, well, fetal though I'm working from fairly dim memories here of my own time in the womb.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, from the day it opened Lincoln Center needed to knit itself better into the streetscape of Manhattan. It was in effect designed not to. It was conceived as an “island of culture", a Beaux Art notion of city planning arts buildings on a platform isolated from the grimy realities around them, like the great museums surrounded by rolling lawns in Cleveland or Kansas City, or the Philadelphia Museum on its Acropolis at the end of Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Lincoln Center was also being built in what was then a pretty rough neighborhood, the place where West Side Story was filmed. It's a miracle they didn't have a drawbridge and a moat.
This is why the larger Lincoln Center renovation scheme that Diller, Scofidio + Renfro are carrying out, which won't be complete until 2009/10, involves redesigning the approach to the Center's main fountain plaza to put a vehicular road below street level and make access from the Broadway side easier for mere pedestrians...
Inside the lobby they also designed eat your heart out Zaha Hadid a long, aerodynamic bar. (It's in the lower right corner of the photo below and the in foreground of the photo up top.) To make the whole space more of a social destination the lobby caf/bar will be open not only to ticket holders but to anybody between 8 AM and 11 PM. Diller says the idea was “to make good on the 'public-ness' of the public space."
Inside the performing space itself there was one particularly nice touch. In addition to the customary house lights from above, an LED lighting system is embedded in resin panels just behind the wood veneer walls. It allows the walls to glow very gently from within. Before every performance those embedded lights will rise and then dim, a wrap-around equivalent of the raising of the chandelier to mark the start of a performance at the Metropolitan Opera. The auditorium is plainly going to be a much warmer place than it was before the renovation. In conversation Diller likes to use a lot of anatomical and biological analogies to explain her firm's work nipples, skin. And there's something about the experience of this warm, dim enclosure that's, well, fetal though I'm working from fairly dim memories here of my own time in the womb.
I can't tell you anything about the acoustics. For that we'll have to wait for the opening week of performances that are scheduled to start Feb. 22.
Continue for great views of the New Lincoln Center
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