The Revson fountain and batwing restaurant spruce up New York’s famed performance venue.
Diller, Scofidio & Renfro have done the impossible. The architecture firm has made the overbearing culture palaces at New York’s Lincoln Center seem engaging, almost hip.
The latest phase in a $1.2 billion overhaul opened May 21, showcasing the new fountain, part of a $4 million gift by the Revson Foundation. Three-hundred-fifty-three nozzles propel water from a thin, dark-granite disk poised on tapering legs.
Like the clunkier original, which gushed for 45 years, it lets you sit on the edge, but its frothing crescendos and pulsing jets have a visceral presence. Passersby seem to find it irresistible.
Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro have conjured magical yet subtle alterations throughout the complex.
A cab-clogged driveway and hideous concrete highway barriers have been banished. The driveway now slips underneath a new, gentler stair with little LED zipper signs set into the risers. They illuminate the events inside the acres of travertine.
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Another token of welcome: long planes of glass. Pairs of knock-kneed columns support these elegant canopies, which bring rain protection some 50 feet out to the street edge. The glass roofs glow in the afternoon sun or at night when bathed by floodlights.
Philip Johnson, the plaza’s original architect, plagiarised Rome’s 16th-century Campidoglio to good effect. It has always come to life when patrons swarm.
None of the three theatres around the plaza is great architecture, but now they all seem to stand tall and throw their shoulders back.
The most controversial alteration is the batwinged roof over a new restaurant. This threatened to ruin the one oasis of serene dignity: Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure set perfectly within an expansive fountain pool. The architects reduced the pool on one side to wedge in the restaurant. Then they squeezed it on the other side by planting three rows of trees.
I’ll take the tradeoff: a welcome intimacy, which lets the Moore retain its dignity in the smaller pool. The grass roof humanises the plaza by replacing a high, off-putting stone wall.
South of the campus, you can buy discount and day-of-show tickets at the handsome Rubenstein Atrium. It’s also a cafe and performance space with lush plantings sprouting from the walls.
Lincoln Center at last rewards casual visitors.
