The ensemble of buildings and public spaces of Lincoln Center are the product of a group of prominent architects including Gordon Bunshaft, Eero Saarinen, Wallace Harrison and Philip Johnson. Lincoln Center has become an icon inextricably linked with New York. The redesign of public spaces includes the Central Plaza, the North Plaza, the conversion of 65th Street from a service corridor into a new central spine, the transformation of three blocks of Lincoln Center’s frontage at Columbus Avenue and eventually, Damrosch Park. The redesign is intended to turn the campus inside out by extending the spectacle within the performance halls into the mute public spaces between the halls and into the surrounding streets. The range of scales for the project requires an effort that dissolves boundaries between urban planning, architecture, landscape design and information design.65th Street Project in collaboration with FxFowle; Promenade Project in collaboration with Beyer Blinder Belle.

Lincoln Center- Public Spaces

 The Landscape Architect talks about some of the design ideas that were incorporated into the revisioning of Lincoln Center, perhaps the most noteworthy being relocating the vehicular entrance below grade. 

H3 has designed a third theater for Lincoln Center Theater on the roof of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, containing 23,000 square feet of administration, support, public, rehearsal and performance spaces. This new building, only partially visible from below, must complement the distinguished Eero Saarinen building and offer a practical way to present new ideas to audiences of just over 100 people. Intended to attract new, younger audiences, this is the Center's first new performance hall.

Lincoln Center Theater, LCT3

Founded by George Balanchine, the School of American Ballet is the premiere ballet academy in the U.S. and the official training academy for the New York City Ballet. The 8,200 square foot expansion includes the addition of two new dance studios within two existing ones in Davis & Brody’s 1990’s Rose Building. The existing 16’-0” high studios are optimized by capturing most of the volume of a deep mechanical plenum above the ceiling and reorganizing ductwork to produce sectional depth for stacked studios. These smaller nesting studios get structural, electrical, and mechanical sustenance from their host. Three steel beams bridge the load into the building’s structure, allowing the new studios to float. Light and views are borrowed from the existing clerestory windows through floor-to-ceiling acoustic glass periphery walls. The two sets of stacked studios are connected by a mezzanine lounge. Its liquid crystal sidewalls can be switched on and off from translucent to transparent at the discretion of instructors to allow or deny parents and visitors visual access to the studios.

school of american ballet

Lincoln Center- School of American Ballet

Originally built for the 1964-1965 World's Fair, this Philip-Johnson-designed building now houses both the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera.

David H. Koch Theater (Lincoln Center)

The forms interrupted by water recalls a reclining figure, as the title suggests, but also could be linked to the rolling hills of Moore's English homeland.

At the reflecting pool in front of Lincoln Center.

Reclining Figure

The re-design is intended to transform the venue from a good multi-purpose hall into a premiere chamber music venue with street identity and upgraded functionality for all performance needs. Tucked under The Juilliard School, the opaque base of Pietro Belluschi’s building is stripped away to reveal the hall’s outer shell. The sloped underside of Juilliard’s expansion serves as the canopy framing the hall, its expanded lobby and box office. A shear one-way cable net glass façade puts the hall on display. The liner of African moabi is tailored around all existing hall features and new programmatic elements to eliminate visual noise and illumination emerges from the wood skin the way a bioluminescent marine organism exudes an internal glow. A percentage of the wood liner is constructed of translucent custom-molded resin panels surfaced in veneer to match and blend seamlessly with the wood, binding the house and stage with light. Like the raising of a chandelier or the parting of a curtain signaling the start of performance, the blush will be part of the performance choreography: a hush will fall in the seconds of transition from distraction to attention when the blushing walls become the first performer. In collaboration with FxFowle.

Lincoln Center- Alice Tully Hall

The dual requirements of a destination restaurant and a public green within the limited open area of Lincoln Center’s North Plaza are satisfied in a single gesture sited between the reflecting pool and the plaza’s north edge. A twisted plane of lawn is elevated to act as an occupiable green roof over a glass pavilion restaurant. The hypar touches down at the SW corner plaza for access to the lawn and has two high points at SE and NW corners. The resulting topography is oriented away from city noise and traffic to create a bucolic urbanism. The contoured wood ceiling of the restaurant frames views to the plaza and the street. A split kitchen serves 160 diners and 40 at the bar. 

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts

Lincoln Center- Hypar Pavilion

Architecture critics mostly pan the Metropolitan Opera's home base, which lacks both the daring of confections like the Sydney Opera House and the grandeur of the Palais Garnier or La Scala. It's hard to argue, however, with the productions that go on inside the building--or with the Chagall paintings that hang in its lobby.

Metropolitan Opera House

This hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, has been infamous for its less-than-fantastic acoustics since it opened in 1962. The initial interior plan was designed by the noted acoustics firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman, but when Lincoln Center caved to the demands of newspaper critics and substantially increased the number of seats in the hall, it invalidated much of the work the firm had done and dramatically altered the acoustic profile of the hall--negatively in the minds of most listeners. Since the hall's opening several renovations have been done to improve its acoustics, including one in the 1970s lead by the noted architect Philip Johnson and another by the architect Norman Foster that is slated to begin sometime in the next few years.

Avery Fisher Hall

The Juilliard School had long outgrown Pietro Belluschi’s 1960’s building, widely considered one of the best examples of Brutalism in the US. The nearly 100,000 square-foot expansion/renovation restores some of the building’s lost architectural features while positioning this premiere music, dance, and drama conservatory for the future. Features of the renovation include an entrance lobby and box office; a black box theater; an orchestra rehearsal space and recording studio; jazz studios; a large dance rehearsal studio; a library expansion; an archive for rare music manuscripts; plus smaller studios, rehearsal rooms, classrooms, administrative offices, and lounges. Three teaching levels are expanded by 45,000 square feet into the open triangular site toward Broadway. The cantilevered volume is a framing canopy for the Tully Hall expansion below. The east façade organizes a system of circulation and public spaces while revealing school activities to the street. New features include a grand lobby entrance stair/hangout space in which risers morph into couches; single surface open riser steel communicating stair; a suspended dance studio opening to the street; and a travertine façade with punched three-dimensional prismatic windows. In collaboration with FxFowle. 

Lincoln Center

Lincoln Center- Juilliard School

 The southern part of the Upper West Side developed quickly in the 1880s along Columbus Avenue. The area was never fashionable and except along Central Park. By late 1940s the part west of Broadway was a slum fostered by its proximity to the open New York Central railroad yards lying between West End Avenue and the river. This latter area was the subject first of low-rent subsidized apartments and then of a 12-block urban renewal project that cleared the tenements and is now the site of the Lincoln Center, Fordham University`s in-town campus, many luxury apartments, and public and institutional buildings. 

Charles Renfro, partner in Diller Scofidio+Renfro, talks about the firm's commision to renovate one of the most important performing arts hubs in New York City. 
"It started as a street scape project" says Renfro but turned into "an expansive rethinking of the Center." The architects touched almost every part of the public space, added on to the Julliard Building,  added a new pavillion on the North Plaza and made surgical changes to the entry steps and the canopies. 

Fountain Place, designed by IM Pei, is a unique work of modern architecture. Catherine Cuellar discusses the work.

Lincoln Center

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