Our critic chats about the beloved stretch from the music hall to Lincoln Center around Central Park with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have raised a family in this part of town, where they still run their architectural practice. They are designers of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the LeFrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and the former American Folk Art Museum on 53rd Street — the building demolished several years ago to make way for the Museum of Modern Art’s latest expansion. Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien also lead the team doing the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center in Chicago and are helping to revamp what used to be called Philharmonic Hall, then Avery Fisher — now Geffen Hall — at Lincoln Center. They live up the block. Before that, and for more than 30 years, they lived and worked in Carnegie Hall.1
- 1. This is the latest in a series of (edited, condensed) walks around New York. It takes in some architecturally beloved buildings like the Gainsborough Studios, Alwyn Court and the West Side YMCA, and it begins on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street, at Carnegie, where Ms. Tsien and Mr. Williams suggested we “meet,” virtually, by phone.
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People may forget that during the late 1950s Carnegie almost went the way of the old Penn Station. It was on the brink of demolition.
Williams The architect Ralph Pomerance had already designed a red tower that was going to go in its place.
Pomerance & Breines, the firm was called. Their plan would have swapped Carnegie for a 44-story office tower clad in red porcelain enamel, set into a sunken plaza, with a bridged entrance.
Williams A cool-looking design, actually, which had absolutely nothing to do with its context — anticipating the sorts of buildings that have recently been rising in the neighborhood.
You mean the supertalls. We’ll get back to them. The violinist Isaac Stern and some of your fellow tenants in the artist studios saved the hall from the wrecking ball. Then James Stewart Polshek renovated Carnegie during the ’80s, and added Zankel Hall in 2003. Today it’s a landmark, but, to be honest, the outside doesn’t begin to suggest how beautiful it is inside.
Williams It’s architecturally ungainly outside but I love that about it. William Tuthill was the architect. He was very, very young and had never done a hall. He was a cellist. The building’s Seventh Avenue elevation, with its fire escapes, is extremely plain. Seventh Avenue is an important avenue, but Tuthill basically said, “Move on, nothing to see there.”
Tsien That elevation reveals nothing about what’s inside. Tod and I have a taste for these sort of buildings — the Pantheon in Rome is an obvious example — which you could walk by 100 times and never guess what the inside looks like.
We haven’t talked about the surrounding neighborhood yet, including the supertalls.
Tsien To me, they’re like obelisks: silent, impenetrable, without contributing much of anything to life on the street. It feels almost as if those pieces of the neighborhood got removed.
To be fair, the neighborhood was never homey.
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