At the inception of what has proven to be a very lengthy renovation, I worked with 2x4 on the language that would help to define the tenor and scope of this project.

Project Text

Forget the past: what is the future?
{Because it is beyond influence, the past is not as compelling.}

Posterity is a powerful concept.
Subject to our influence, it is vulnerable to our determination.
The best is yet to come.

Our vision of the future is based on the historical shift that defines this moment. The advent of digital technology has launched the modern community into the ether. The breakdown of traditional boundaries between media has created overlapping art forms. The city’s topography and demography are changing faster than ever.

What remains constant is Lincoln Center’s pivotal role in defining the modern performing arts center. But reflecting these evolving paradigms, it must now become a proponent of the new in-between territories, both physical and artistic. Lincoln Center must attract and accommodate the artists and audiences of this new era.

The porous boundaries between art forms situated in beneficial proximity to one another is an apt model for the relationship between Lincoln Center and New York City. To maximize the overlap and flow between them, the public spaces must be more fully exploited. A reconfiguration of these shared stages responds to the need for (non-ethereal) community. Lincoln Center becomes more accessible, more essential to the neighborhood and the city at large.

So the walls come down. The result is liberating: an inviting visual transparency. an amalgam of content (dance informs film informs opera); a diversity of people and pastimes. Moods of serenity and spectacle are orchestrated throughout the site, generating more possibilities and greater density.

Lincoln Center exists as a social condenser, a place where exhibitionism and spectatorship are in constant confrontation. By rendering it easier to penetrate, by transforming the interstitial spaces into hives and havens, it fulfills a more complex agenda.