Just a few years later, the surgical-like strikes carried out by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro at Lincoln Center have healed. Now the LED banners on the steps to the main courtyard, the covered ramps at each side, the wooded garden and green-roofed restaurant pavilion in the north courtyard, and even the clipped southeast corner at the Julliard School, all seem entirely natural, as if they’ve been there forever. There’s been one less noticeable intervention after that: the new 112-seat Claire Tow Theater by H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, led by Hugh Hardy. It was built right on top of the existing Lincoln Center Theater, which houses the larger Vivian Beaumont and Newhouse Theaters.
The Tow is remarkable for its restraint on both the outside and the inside. So often when I walk into a new building I sense immediately that a professional designer has been there. The place is overcrowded with gestures and even if all of them been executed judiciously there’s simply too much going on, too much to consider, and it weighs down the experience. The Tow isn’t like that. It’s a simple, wood-lined, shoebox-shaped room with rows of fold-down seats and a U-shaped catwalk above. I watched a 90-minute one-act play there seated comfortably in the last row, from where I could see every corner of the stage and hear every word clearly. The new theater, which was built along with support spaces for the other theaters below, is set back on the old theater’s roof so that it’s barely visible from street level. In front there’s an open wood deck where theater-goers can collect before and after performances and observe the fray below, and all around are native plantings. The Tow is planned and finished simply; its refined proportions and one-of-a-kind setting are what bring it to life. Perhaps because Hardy has worked on prominent civic projects like this for four decades, he doesn’t feel the need, as another architect would, to raise his voice or confront the existing building, a beloved one by Eero Saarinen. His discretion is impressive.