Alice Tully Hall - Site and Context

Site and Context

The Juilliard School building sits along the west side of Broadway, between 65th and 66th Streets (across the street from Avery Fisher Hall and the Lincoln Center parking garage). Prior to its expansion, it maintained a rectangular footprint of approximately 200 x 350 feet (110 m). Also, prior to the re-development project, the building’s primary means of connection to the main Lincoln Center complex was a large pedestrian footbridge (named the Paul Milstein Plaza) that crossed over—and covered a large portion of—West 65th Street. Despite the original building’s shape, its site was rhomboidal in shape, due to the diagonal progression of Broadway through the rigid orthogonal grid of Manhattan. Rejecting Broadway’s diagonal, the architects oriented Juilliard to the grid, using the remaining triangular section as a small plaza.

Lincoln Center was constructed as part of the Slum Clearance Committee’s Lincoln Square Urban Renewal Area Project (also known as the Lincoln Square Title I project), in which 17 blocks of tenements and slums were demolished and over 7,000 families were displaced. In the years following the complex’s construction, the surrounding area has been extensively rebuilt, establishing itself as an important commercial and cultural hub. Lincoln Center and Juilliard are now surrounded by myriad high-end cafes, shops, restaurants, and mixed-use high-rise buildings. Some notable facilities in the area include the Empire Hotel on West 63rd Street & Broadway, the Manhattan New York Temple of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on West 65th Street & Columbus Avenue, and the American Museum of Folk Art. Concerning public transportation, Lincoln Center can be reached by the M5, M7, M10, M11, M66 and M104 bus lines and the #1 subway line.

Though not located on the complex’s superblock between West 62nd and 65th Streets, the architects identified the original Juilliard building with Lincoln Center through the footbridge connection and use of cladding. Gordon Bunshaft originally envisioned the bridge to better integrate Juilliard with the main Lincoln Center campus and hide street traffic. Little to no consideration was given regarding the effects of such a wide bridge on the street below. Further amplifying a sense of detachment from the urban fabric of New York, the theatres of Lincoln Center sit on a plinth above street level. The October 1956 conference in which Pietro Belluschi had participated produced a consensus among the architects that the complex would be an inward-looking area that was isolated from the activities of the city. Alvar Aalto, another conference participant, envisioned Lincoln Center as a “casbah with high walls to the outside world.” In the 1950s, the Upper West Side, especially the west 60s, was not viewed as a pleasing walking environment, but more as something alien and unfriendly by the architects.

The structures of the main complex are designed in a Neoclassical Modernist style, while Juilliard is a Brutalist building. When compared with the open and transparent facades of the “superblock buildings” in the main complex, the heavy massing of the Juilliard building gives it the appearance of a fortress. However, Juilliard fits within its immediate context because of its exterior cladding. All of Lincoln Center’s original buildings (built before the redevelopment project) are clad with travertine.

As Juilliard’s main public theatre, Alice Tully Hall was not given a prominent entrance, despite the fact that it was housed in the only Lincoln Center building on a site directly facing Broadway. The entrance was instead tucked under the second-story outdoor terrace/footbridge and the monumental exterior staircase that led up to it from the plaza. This, the rejection of the diagonal, and the setting back of the building from Broadway, follow a similar logic of detachment from the city street that the main Lincoln Center campus embodied. This original entrance to Tully Hall became fully visible only once the terrace, staircase, and footbridge were removed in 2006.

The expansion of Juilliard and Tully Hall extended the travertine cladding of the original building along the West 65th Street facade, which helps maintain a visual/material connection with Avery Fisher Hall across the street. However, the most significant move was the establishment of a monumental public entrance along Broadway that is instantly recognizable as a point of public entry. The extension cantilevers over a new sunken plaza that is open at all times. Furthermore, the edge of the extension follows the diagonal of Broadway, bringing the formerly reclusive-feeling Juilliard building all the way to this busy avenue and engaging it more actively with the life of the Lincoln Square area while maintaining the presence of outdoor public space. Whereas the modernist Lincoln Center had shied away from and rejected the street, the new Lincoln Center and the new Alice Tully Hall reject this anti-street sentiment wholesale. The expansive use of glazing along the Broadway facade extends the transparency of Lincoln Center’s buildings. People can now look inside and outside far more easily than before, just as they had been able to do in the superblock buildings since their construction.