Anthony Tommasini offers a 50-year assessment of Lincoln Center in the New York Times that’s worth a read, especially if your town is planning a major multi-venue cultural facility. Although, Tommasini may have missed the recent and continuing developments across the country built upon its model:
Yet if a sprawling performing-arts complex like Lincoln Center were proposed today, it would never be built. Some of the impediments would be practical: the daunting costs, the lack of political consensus, the shift in attitudes toward large-scale urban development projects that displace entire neighborhoods. But the larger question is whether such a complex should be built in the first place.
Tommasini weighs the relative merits of a shared home for multiple resident arts organizations (with many brands, boards, and agendas), and comes up mixed on the results. The combination seems to have brought larger impact on the community (transforming a blighted area…again with some mixed feelings), and grudging cohabitation by its tenants, but also some permanence and persistence to the arts.
Worth considering as we continue to build it, over and over again.
Yes, interesting article. I’ve been doing an independent study on public policy and the arts, and I posted some thoughts last night on the merits of “cultural palaces” like Lincoln Center in community/urban development strategies. You can read it here: http://createquity.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-arts-and-developing-communities.html