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Lincoln Center gets a pedestrian-friendly redesign from Diller Scofidio + Renfro If you've ever been to New York, you've probably been past Lincoln Center, home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and Julliard. It's an ugly sight. The main buildings themselves are meh, but the buildings..
01.20.09
Lincoln Center gets a pedestrian-friendly redesign from Diller Scofidio + Renfro
If you've ever been to New York, you've probably been past Lincoln Center, home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and Julliard. It's an ugly sight. The main buildings themselves are meh, but the buildings all around hulk like bouncers outside a club. And the urban planning is a mess: whizzing cars, sidewalks that are, by turns, huge and empty or perilously narrow.At the northern corner of the Lincoln Center compound sits Alice Tully Hall, which shares a building with Julliard. The design was always unfortunate-a bulky, grimy monolith that you'd hustle past. But not anymore: The architecture firm of Diller Scofidio+Renfro, working with FX Fowle Architects, have begun a slow overhaul of the campus. On February 23, they'll unveil their renovation of Alice Tully Hall. On Wednesday, GOOD got a sneak peak.DS+R have always been obsessed with surveillance, watching and being watched. Their legendary-but never built-"Slow House," designed in 1991, was basically a tube that led from the front door to a massive window overlooking a lake. But it wasn't that simple: In front of the windows, DS+R (then just Diller Scofidio) proposed a video screen that would also display recorded images of the view. They've also created a façade for a theater in San Jose comprising video monitors playing footage from surveillance cameras hidden inside.Those projects were ice-cold critiques of contemporary culture. But the firm has mellowed. Their genius for creating sly viewpoints has become an expertise for gratifying the human instinct for people watching. This summer, that expertise will be on full display, when the anxiously anticipated Highline Park opens. (Though DS+R often gets sole credit, it was a collaboration with landscape architects Field Operations.) Together, these two projects will be sparkling examples of public space in the 21st century.