Architecture for the Arts

Not since the 1930s when Rockefeller Center pushed skyward in defiance of the Depression, and the 1940s when top architects from around the world gathered to build the glass-slab United Nations Secretariat, has Manhattan had such a big-scale architectural project with a claim to worldwide attention. The project of the 1950s and 1960s, previewed last week, is the $75 million, eleven-acre development for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan's West 60s. With about half the money pledged and most legal roadblocks cleared. Lincoln Center President John D. Rockefeller III took the wraps off plans for a whole complex of structures which he hopes will become "a new American landmark."

The prima donna of the center will be a new Metropolitan Opera House, designed by Architect Wallace K. Harrison to rise from a plaza the size of Venice's San Marco. Created in a style Architect Harrison calls "modern baroque," the new Met will have five huge, barrel-vault cantilevers rising to a height of eight stories at the entrance, grille-and-glass fac,aded sides, and a horseshoe interior seating 3,800 (v. the Met's 3,612). The 108-ft.-deep stage will be serviced by a 14-story stage loft and three movable stages, one equipped with turntable.

Around the new Met will be grouped structures for the other performing arts. Manhattan Architect Max Abramovitz (Harrison's partner) is designing the Concert Hall, aimed at seating 2,550 and achieving even greater acoustical perfection than the New York Philharmonic's famed Carnegie Hall. To house a permanent dance repertory group, Architect Philip Johnson (TIME, July 2, 1956) will design a structure that will have "walls papered with people," i.e., a system of balconies giving clear sight lines to the stage. M.I.T. Architecture Dean Pietro Belluschi will build a new Juilliard School. For a park to the southwest, the Guggenheim Foundation will donate a $500,000 bandstand for summer concerts. Still to be assigned from a pool of such top architects as Eero Saarinen and Edward D. Stone are commissions for a repertory theater and a museum-library.

Target date for the Concert Hall is now July 1960. The new Met is due to be finished in July 1961; the Theater of the Dance by July 1963. Says Center President Rockefeller: "It is proper that Lincoln Center should represent the best of American architecture, for we are building not for today or tomorrow, but for 100 years. We hope Lincoln Center will stand, in the eyes of the world, as a symbol of our national regard for the arts, and our recognition of their importance in the lives of the American people."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.