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Lincoln Center is not a landmark - at least by designation.  Most would agree that it is a landmark of some sort - if not architecturally, certainly for its cultural impact.  And yet, despite concerted (and well-founded) efforts made by groups like DOCOMOMO and folks like Andrew S. Dolkart, the city and state have opted against any sort of designation.  (Dolkart has intimated that the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) shied away from designation due to pressure from city hall, which wants Lincoln Center’s $1.2 billion renovation project to go forward; naturally, the LPC denies as much.)

Regardless of whether Lincoln Center merits official protection (it probably does), preservationists have good reason to be dissatisfied with certain components of the renovation project.

Perhaps the most indefensible change is the (on-going) construction of a restaurant on a portion of the north plaza, originally designed by landscape architect Dan Kiley in 1965.  The restaurant’s main design feature, its angled and tilted green roof that rises from the plaza’s floor, is perfectly fine - even excellent - but given the plaza’s history, it seems particularly insensitive (this is a good example of how landscape architecture tends to be overlooked when it comes to historic preservation).

The north plaza was born as a stately, serenely-elegant, travertine-paved, tree-covered, public space.  When the restaurant is completed in September, the plaza will be reborn as a truncated, quite ordinary, landscape.  At that point, the plaza will no longer be center stage for viewing Lincoln Center’s similarly stately Modern buildings.  Instead, eyes will inevitably be drawn to the eating establishment peeking out from under two tectonic plates, remnants of an apparently incredibly-isolated bout of seismic activity.

And yet - despite these preservationists’ justified dislike for the restaurant and renovation in general - their disdain for Hugh Hardy’s design of a new “black box” theater, placed on top of the Vivian Beaumont Theater (see above), seems quite undeserved.  To begin with, historic preservation is not (necessarily) about freeze-framing the built environment.  Although there is always risk that a historic building’s architectural integrity could be destroyed by an alteration, that does not mean that every conceivable alteration would be destructive.

In this case, Hugh Hardy’s design is neither destructive of nor insensitive to Eero Saarinen’s original design.  His proposal is to house a new “black box” theater (essentially an intimate theater for untested performances and $20 tickets) in a rectangular box on top of the Beaumont Theater.  The box would be set back from the edges of the Beaumont’s roof line - particularly well back from the Beaumont’s plaza-facing side, be sheathed in glass, and shielded by a permeable metal screen.  The Beaumont would also get a green roof and patio, accessible from the black box theater’s lobby area.

Dolkart dislikes the design in part because he thinks the theater would be visible from Lincoln Center’s north plaza and because it would weigh down the Beaumont like a “big visible box on the roof of the building, which has the sense of floating now.”

As to his latter criticism, I simply disagree; despite the theater’s “black box” nickname, its outward appearance is anything but.  Its mass is minimized not only by the semi-transparent metal screen, but also from the walls of glass set back from them.  These two things don’t weigh the Beaumont down; they enliven and lighten it.

As for Dolkart’s visibility concerns (which Hardy denies is even an issue), I’d reiterate that at least in this context, you can maintain a (deserved) landmark’s architectural integrity even when an alteration is visible, so long as it is sensitive and responsive to the original structure.

There is a bit of irony here too, since, as both of these images show, every major building in the complex has an opaque, rectangular box protruding from the roof.  Yes, a few boxes are not visible from the street - but from every angle, the Beaumont’s existing (and ugly and heavy-looking) roof-top box is visible.  To the extent Hardy’s new theater would be more visible from the north plaza, I actually think it would be only marginally so - and in any event, constitute a major improvement over what is currently there.

At the very least, the new theater will address Herbert Muschamp’s lament (expressed way back in 2002), that “[d]esign and planning can reduce the isolation between Lincoln Center and its neighborhood.  But public access will remain restricted so long as ticket prices remain astronomically high.”  Now that $20-patrons are finally in Lincoln Center’s mind, there seems little sense in pushing their venue out of sight, right?

Images courtesy of  rbglasson and Bing Maps.