Word: lincolner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts was first proposed, in the mid-1950s, it was imagined as a sort of island of culture in the midst of Manhattan - a symphony hall, an opera house, a theater and a stage for ballet, all standing back a bit in their travertine glory from a neighborhood on the Upper West Side that still had some very rough edges...
...place opened in stages from 1962 to 1969, Lincoln Center turned out to be not just an island but an acropolis. At its northern and western boundaries, it sat on a platform 24 ft. (7.3 m) above the surrounding streets, as though it would just as soon not touch down with the locals. Those streets, after all, were so authentically funky that some of them had served as locations for the film version of West Side Story. When you consider that the Jets and the Sharks used to flash their switchblades not far from where the Metropolitan Opera now stands...
...with enough determination and inspiration - and reliable financing - transformation can happen. The proof is that this month, in the first part of a $1.2 billion, multistage redesign of its 16 acre (6.5 hectare) campus, Lincoln Center will reopen Alice Tully Hall, its chamber-music auditorium, in a building ingeniously reconfigured to announce to anybody passing by, Come in, we're here, make yourself at home...
...Alice Tully Hall, which shares space with the Lincoln Center Film Society, the Juilliard School of Music and the School of American Ballet, spent the past 40 years locked inside a squat stretch of travertine that would have been perfect for an FBI fingerprint lab. Completed in 1969 in the design idiom called Brutalism, it ran more than half the length of a city block with hardly a grace note or welcoming gesture. To make matters worse, a heavy pedestrian bridge that connected it to the main Lincoln Center campus, across 65th Street, cast a broad swath of that street...
...JumboTron but with real people dancing inside it. "We were trying to strike a balance," says Diller, "between the monumental and the dematerialized." Then they sliced the new space with a multistory diagonal plane. It creates a giant triangular canopy that launches itself toward Broadway like a tsunami. "At Lincoln Center," Diller says, "small gestures don't work...