Proposal, in 2000, for a new Lincoln Center by Franck, Lohsen & McCrery. (City Journal)

The Future Symphony Institute has reprinted on its website three plans to rebuild Lincoln Center, published in the autumn 2000 issue of City Journal, the quarterly of the Manhattan Institute. “A New Lincoln Center,” though or in fact because it is quite long, is a joy to read. Myron Magnet, the journal’s editor, before inviting three classical architects to describe their individual plans, launches such a memorable case against the architecture of the current Lincoln Center, and against modern architecture generally, that I would reprint the article even if it were completely without any timely rationale for doing so.

I sent a query to FSI asking about that. Its founder and director, Andrew Balio – he is also principal trumpet for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra – replied with a plausible argument.

Indeed, the New York Philharmonic has begun the campaign to raise $500 million to renovate the inside of what is now called David Geffen Hall, formerly Avery Fisher. They have raised $100 million from Mr. Geffen. … It is a shame because they all need to be replaced with something such as you see in the article. For some reason, it has been deemed that Lincoln Center is worthy of historic protection status. I, and many , many people, do not share that view. So, it is still relevant!

To be sure. How magisterial for New York were the Lincoln Center to be rebuilt along lines reminiscent of New York at the apogee of its 20th century greatness even as pressure builds to do the same thing with Pennsylvania Station. New York can afford to do this. America can afford to do this.

On the other hand, maybe the current Penn Station into which we scuttle like rats should receive heritage protection status. It is verging on half a century long in the tooth, isn’t it?

Again, Magnet wrote his piece in 2000. His three classicists were Quinlan Terry, Robert Adam and the firm of Franck, Lohsen & McCrery. The FLC proposal brought to mind its proposal just a year or so later, also printed in City Journal, to rebuild the World Trade Center. If that classical plan had been selected, it would have been completed far sooner, for far less money, and Manhattan would have fallen in love with it.

It is too late for the World Trade Center, but a classically rebuilt Lincoln Center and Penn Station would work the same magic for New York City.

To conclude, I take a paragraph from Myron Magnet’s passages leading up to the three proposals. A tough job; still, choosing just one from the entire procession of his critical remarks must be described as a thankful task.

Most critics, as the individual buildings opened between 1962 and 1969, charged that they failed because they weren’t modernist enough. In fact, the reverse was the case: they were insufficiently traditional. As it was, the architects of the three principal buildings fell between two stools. As they attempted to cling to their modernist principles while at the same time making a nod toward the tradition of classical architecture, they created a kind of proto-postmodernism: modernist buildings with some traditionalist doodads tacked on. Lacking postmodernism’s smart-aleck “irony,” though, these buildings really are nothing but kitsch – sentimental and insincere evocations of something meaningful, without any understanding of, or passion for, the underlying ideal. So perhaps the best critic of the complex was Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, who at the Opera House’s opening gushed: “Ah have an impression of red; Ah have an impression of gold; Ah have an impression of chandeliers.” Crude impressions of bygone elegance, shreds and patches of tradition, is what Lincoln Center’s architecture is all about.

Lincoln Center (wikipedia.org)