The Juilliard Expansion, NYC, USA
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ass.
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role
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DS+R
FxFowle
Arup
Project Director DS+R
Built
2006
The renovation and expansion of The Juiliard School is part of a larger redevelopment project for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, comprising the expansion of several facilities, the re-design of Alice Tully Hall, the redesign of public spaces including Central Plaza, Damrosh Park and North Plaza, a new 250-seat glass pavilion restaurant, the transformation of three blocks of Lincoln Center’s frontage at Columbus Avenue, and the conversion of 65th Street from a service corridor into a new central spine. The range of scales for the project requires an effort that dissolves boundaries between urban planning, architecture, landscape design and information design.
The ensemble of buildings and public spaces of Lincoln Center are the product of a group of prominent architects, including Gordon Bunshaft, Eero Saarinen, Wallace Harrison and Philip Johnson. It has become an icon inextricably linked with New York. The architectural challenge has been to interpret the genetic code of this 60s architecture into a language that can speak to a diverse audience after several generations of cultural and political change.
The Juilliard School is the largest of the constituent projects. It has long outgrown its 50-year-old home. The quantity and quality of the current performance spaces and studios are inadequate. It has no front door nor presence on the street. While Pietro Belluschi’s 1960’s building is considered to be one of the best examples of Brutalism in the US, it was compromised through renovations over the years. The renovation/expansion restores some its lost architectural gestures and positions this premiere music, dance, and drama school for the future.
The 45,000 sq ft expansion and 50,000 sq ft renovation gives Juilliard an entrance lobby and box office, a black box theater, an orchestra rehearsal/recital space with a recording studio, an expansion of their jazz program, a large dance rehearsal studio, plus many smaller studios, rehearsal rooms, classrooms, administrative offices, a bookstore, lounges, a library expansion, and an archive for rare musical manuscripts.
As it was structurally impossible to build on top of the existing structure, the addition (levels 3-5) is extruded into the open triangular space to the east and sliced to conform to the angle of Broadway. A new shear glass facade organizes a system of circulation and public spaces to the inside while revealing the cross section and building activities to the outside. The underside of the sloped cantilever provides a framing canopy for the new Alice Tully Hall expansion below.
