Stripping, Filling, Lifting | Transforming Lincoln Center: From Harrison, Johnson & Co to Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Deciding to go under the knife often involves a mix of love and hate—and Lincoln Center has long been a place New York residents and architects “love to hate.” Even its reason for existence was born of controversy. For politician Robert Moses in the 1960’s, the world’s then largest Performing Arts Center was a mere alibi for clearing away another slum. Conceived as an acropolis for the cultural elite, and rising physically and metaphorically above the city, Lincoln Center was soon criticized for its overall detachment from its urban environment, the unsavory forms of its main theatre buildings, and the inadequacies of the performance spaces. Yet, designed by an all-star roster that included Wallace K. Harrison, Max Abramovitz, Philipp Johnson, Gordon Bunshaft, Eero Saarinen and Pietro Belluschi, Lincoln Center still became a historic landmark and prime example of monumental modernism of the 1960s. Fifty years later, like many other modernist buildings of its time, Lincoln Center needed renovation. It underwent a major transformation aiming at redefining its relation to public space. Diller Scofidio + Renfro  devised a strategy of surgical interventions that promised to give the center a second chance, enhancing its original architecture rather than to negate or overwrite it. After ten years of planning and its recent completion, it is time to assess the extreme makeover.

Stefan Gruber worked on the transformation of Lincoln Center at Diller+Scofidio from 2002-2006 as project leader responsible for all Front of House and public spaces of Alice Tully Hall. Since 2006 he is principal of STUDIOGRUBER, a Vienna based office for architecture, urbanism and research. He is currently the professor for Geography, Landscapes, Cities at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

BIG! BAD? MODERN:

The Academy of Fine Arts, Institute for Art and Architecture will throughout the 2010-11 academic year debate and suggest new ideas in order to revisit the cultural heritage of modernism, its built and un-built utopias.

Modernism has produced some of the largest single buildings of our times.

Today architects continue to speak of their achievements in terms of size and square meters. City developments are measured in hectares and acres, when concerning emerging economies even in square kilometres.

Le Corbusier's allegorical ocean liner became the normative and even litteral reference in many debates on the city and its architecture. Megastructures, as autonomous systems of dense living, working and existence became the basis of many architectural theses. The metabolists, the archigram group, the situationists and many other thinkers/architects such as Rossi and perhaps to the present time Koolhaas have described through various models the potential of projecting in cities.

The lecture series BIG! BAD? MODERN: will explore the Modernist belief in architecture's capacity to absorb the city scale. It will do so by presenting various speakers who are addressing the issue from different foci.

Nasrine Seraji | Head of Institute

11.04.2011 | Lecture Stefan Gruber
09.05.2011 | Lecture Kalliope Kontozoglou
23.05.2011 | Lecture Sabine Kraft
15.06.2011 | Peter Leeb, Architect, Professor | Vienna
30.06.2011 | Shelley McNamara, Architect | Dublin

www.akbild.ac.at/ika