BIG! BAD? MODERN: Lecture Stefan Gruber

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.