In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, architect/space maven David Rockwell had an interesting jab against the mother of all multi-venue performance spaces. As an aside in a quick Q & A about his latest design project — the reconceived flagship F.A.O. Schwarz store in Manhattan — he had this to say about Lincoln Center:
”My goal as an architect is to follow my instincts. Limiting yourself to architecture with a capital A can be stifling. You don’t want to end up building more Lincoln Centers, a piece of modernism that’s not about people but the boxing of culture.”
Rockwell is known for his textural and narrative space designs — which he’s applied to chic restaurants (Nobu, Town, and others), Broadway sets (Hairspray), and performance spaces (the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, environments for Cirque du Soleil). In a profile in Fast Company, he described the narrative and theatrical potential of designed space, and the dangerous lure of iconic design:
”The things that have the most-lasting effect are also the most fleeting.” So it goes with design, which need not always aspire to the grandiose and the permanent. Like theater itself, design can also be ephemeral and experiential. A restaurant, a hotel lobby — even a workplace — can become a stage set that transforms everyday experience, if only for a few moments. That realization set Rockwell free from the dead-end ambition of aiming for architectural posterity. ”If permanence is your goal,” Rockwell says now, ”it rules out everything that isn’t permanent.”
It’s an interesting tension to ponder as you wander any of the new cultural facilities opening their doors across the country at the moment, or coming into shape on blueprints. Many of them are built on the Lincoln Center model — big-box culture with common spaces designed to shock and awe, that make the visitor feel small and transitory, and that make the culture within them seem fixed and immovable.
Who’s building new cultural facilities that focus on the human scale, and the experience of perception rather than the demands of production?
