Alice Tully Hall - Form, Use and Construction

Form, Use and Construction

In keeping with the Brutalist style, Juilliard features rigorous geometries and highly cantilevered forms. Initial studies by Pietro Belluschi and Eduardo Catalano related more toward the white classical temple image adopted for the other Lincoln Center buildings. As the studies progressed and the site moved to the lot between West 65th and 66th Streets, there was an administrative shift at the Juilliard School. The new president expanded the curriculum and altered the program of the school. In response to these changes in both site and program, the design, ultimately constructed, was the Robert Burns scheme fashioned off the MIT Student Center.

The scheme is based on the placement of main performance spaces on either side of a central vertical circulation core. At a cost of nearly $30 million, the 490,000-square-foot (46,000 m2) building contained: 10 floors (4 above ground, 4 below), 3 Juilliard theaters, the public Alice Tully Hall, 15 large dance, opera, and drama studios, 3 organ studios, 84 practice rooms, 27 classrooms and ensemble studios, 30 private instruction studios, numerous orchestra and choral rehearsal rooms, scenery and costume studios and workshops, a library, lounge, snack bar, and administration offices. The theatres and working floors are tied together by a West 65th Street vestibule-lobby that rises several stories, allowing one to orient oneself upon entering the building. The arrangement and packing of a campus’ worth of spaces into a single building greatly impressed architectural critics, but was not as well received by the students of Juilliard, who were confused by the building’s circulation.

The Juilliard building, set on a regular structural grid, was designed in steel and concrete with a travertine veneer (for which the material was donated by the Italian government). Most of the building’s interior was extremely simple, with walls often left as bare concrete aggregate with wall-to-wall carpeting on the floors in several areas. The theatres, on the other hand, were far more finely detailed. Tully Hall was (in accordance with the desires of Alice Tully herself) designed with wood batten with dampening behind, and lavender carpet “casting 1930s-ish mauve lights in the foyer.” Though the theatre's lobby was large, it was depressed several feet below grade. The theatre was designed mainly for recitals and chamber music performances, but because the first three rows of seats could be replaced by an expanded stage, it could also accommodate small orchestras. Tully Hall is located within 22 feet (6.7 m) of the subway tunnel under Broadway, and this required the insertion of a one-inch-thick, cork-lined asbestos pad between the theater's foundation and bedrock, as well as the isolation of the theater's walls from structural columns. Tully Hall’s acoustics were praised as being among the best of any performance hall in Lincoln Center, thanks to the work of acoustician Heinrich Keilholz (who consulted on the acoustics of the entire building as well).

An area of disappointment, however, was the tucking of the public entrance to Alice Tully Hall under the second-story terrace and exterior staircase, making it difficult to find. The removal of the West 65th Street footbridge, in 2006, unveiled this entrance, but it did not attain full prominence until the renovation and expansion of Tully Hall and Juilliard.

As part of the Lincoln Center Redevelopment Project, the Juilliard School needed another 45,000 square feet (4,200 m2) of space and wanted Alice Tully Hall’s interiors and public spaces to be more welcoming. The expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and FXFOWLE extended the travertine cladding of the original building along the West 65th Street facade, and also created an adapted extension of the Brutalist geometries on the upper stories. The fourth-story row of recesses housing windows is extended, but with the glass displaced and extending beyond the recesses, differentiating the extension from the original building and subtly beginning to break the original Brutalist box. The Juilliard extension cantilevers over a sunken public plaza and a new 38-foot-6-inch-high glazed lobby. The underside of the extension tilts up at a 16-degree angle. A dance studio punches through the curtain wall, overlooking Broadway. The transparency of the entry makes it feel like an extension of the Broadway sidewalk. A grandstand of bleacher-style seating on the far corner of the plaza rises at a similar angle to the canopy.

Structural glazed walls bring daylight into three stories of rehearsal space and classrooms in the extension, and the protruding dance studio is suspended beneath its soffit. East-west running trusses were installed between the third and sixth levels to carry the load for the four floors of the expansion, the longest of which has a 75-foot (23 m) back span with a 50-foot (15 m) cantilever. Some of the trusses’ diagonals needed to be offset to accommodate doors, passageways, and other obstructions. Steel diagonal brace frames extend from the ground to the roof to support the lateral load.

Acoustician Mark Holden and his team measured every surface of the old performance hall to determine which were re-radiating the noise of the subway, and found that the stage and seating floors, and proscenium stage’s vertical panels were the responsible members. The new floors sit on a floating concrete slab with a rubber pad, and the spin walls are mounted on giant rubber isolators, which work to mitigate the sounds of the subway.

Tully Hall’s lobby doubled in size from 5,157 to 9,468 square feet (879.6 m2), now with a 3,600-square-foot (330 m2) patron’s salon on the mezzanine level. A public café named at65 is visible in the lobby along Broadway, backed by blood-red walls of tongue-and-groove muirapiranga wood, which now wrap the new performance hall (renamed the Starr Theater). The lobby’s floors are made of Portuguese ataija azul limestone. The east and south elevations are sheathed with a mullionless one-way-cable wall system, allowing for maximum transparency.

Narrow passageways lead to the side entrances of the concert hall. The passageway walls are lined with dark gray felt and the floors are covered with gray industrial carpeting. Elisabeth Diller calls this the “sensory deprivation space”, as it is meant to heighten the drama of coming into the auditorium. The theatre’s new skin consists almost entirely of translucent eco-friendly resin and African moabi wood panels that were developed with 3form (and are between 1 and 1.5 inches thick). The panels form gill-like acoustic baffles along the side walls or become pivoting pyramid shapes that bounce sound. Sections of the balcony and side walls give emit a soft pinkish light as LEDs hidden behind them glow through the superthin moabi veneer. Aesthetics, acoustics, and lighting were all incorporated into these panels to remove visual clutter and create a more inviting space. The stage can now be configured in three different ways, as the front rows are capable of sliding down and underneath it.