An icon of New York City’s cultural scene, the 1,100-seat Alice Tully Hall is a cornerstone of Manhattan’s major performing arts complex. Built in 1969, its recent renovation is part of a large-scale rethinking of the entire Lincoln Center campus, with the design work led by Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects. The opening week of festivities began on Sunday, February 22 and the music critics are happy with the new acoustics, and acoustician Mark Holden of JaffeHolden is floating on air. In fact, The New York Times titled its article: “At Last, Heavenly Acoustics Are Heard in the Hall.” 

VISUAL IMPACT

“We wanted to give Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School a better presence on the street and break down the hard barriers. Open walls now provide a better interface with city,” says Liz Diller, principal at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who collaborated with FXFOWLE Architects on Tully. The footprint of the building has been stretched toward Broadway to echo the shape of its site, creating a larger lobby area with glass walls that lighten both the original design by architect Pietro Belluschi and the travertine marble façades that define Lincoln Center.

“We wanted to make the hall more intimate, both in terms of visual and acoustic intimacy,” notes Diller. “This hall is the workhorse of Lincoln Center. It has to do everything, but in the past, it did everything pretty well and nothing perfectly well. We wanted to make it a great concert hall.” One of the design approaches to achieve this intimacy was to visually connect the stage area with the auditorium by paneling the hall with a continuous skin of moabi, a warm, rusty-orange African wood. “It is the opposite of a proscenium,” Diller points out. “We congealed the stage and the house.”

The extremely thin moabi veneers (taken from one single log) are attached to a composite substrate. “There are areas you can’t see,” notes Diller, “where the substrate is resin. When the wood is surface-lit, it all looks the same. When illuminated from behind, the walls glow like a human blush. There are no harsh edges anywhere; there is a very organic feeling.” The individually-addressed Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions/Color Kinetics RGB LED fixtures are tucked into the shallow cavity behind the walls that are part of the acoustic treatment.

“The use of the lighting is timed with the shows,” Diller says. “As the audience turns from murmur to attention, when the house lights go to an inner glow on the walls, they then transition to show lighting. It’s a complicated thing to make happen.”

In contrast with the warm wood, the custom seats by Poltrona Frau are covered in dark gray suede for a contemporary look in the interior, which has been reshaped to reflect its original, unobstructed style, with a fin running down each side under the balcony seating to echo the fins found on late ‘60s cars. “Everything was shaped to help control the sound,” says Diller. “All materials—wood, resin, and fabric on the seats—were acoustically tested to be just right. We worked closely with the acousticians and theatre consultants to create a new state-of-the-art theatre for the 21st century. It was a dream collaboration.”

RETHINKING THE HALL

“Our charge was to renew the room,” says Josh Dachs, principal at Fisher Dachs Associates, the theatre consultants for the project, who got involved over five years ago and took the lead on the renewal of the technology systems. “The architects stripped the old surfaces off the walls, and we stripped off all the old technology.” Rigging, lighting, acoustic treatment, support spaces (including new dressing rooms with ADA access), and new seating were all part of the program. “We considered the possibility of adding aisles but kept the hall’s traditional continental seating in the layout people were accustomed to,” explains Dachs. “We did remove the small railings that existed and re-spaced the rows, but in terms of sightlines, very little had to be done to the topology of the floor.”

In addition to serving as a concert hall, Alice Tully is also home to the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Improvements were made to the projection equipment; a new, fully motorized screen has been installed, and the surround-sound speakers pivot from the walls. “This saves an enormous amount of time and effort for the stagehands,” notes Dachs. “The Film Society is ecstatic.”

ACOUSTIC CONSIDERATIONS

“It wasn’t a bad hall at all,” says lead acoustician Mark Holden, whose firm, JaffeHolden, served as acousticians for the renovation. “We wanted to improve it as much as possible. The basic bones didn’t change; they didn’t need to. It was more changes in shaping and angles to create a space that is bright, live, and resonate, where classical music sounds good. But it is also a very flexible space where the Film Society of Lincoln Center shows films with 5.0 surround sound, so the room needs to adjust acoustically.”

Adjustable acoustic towers can be used in various configurations on stage, pivoting as needed to reveal a reflective hardwood surface for classical music or a surface of black absorptive material (with 2" thick fiberglass panels) for film. Four acoustic reflectors hung over the stage can be adjusted in terms of height and angle as desired (there is no fly tower above the stage since the theatre is tucked underneath Juilliard).

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