Lifting the Curse

I remember the day, even the general hour, I heard Lincoln Center planned to redo Avery Fisher Hall. It was August 2017, at the beginning of my first year of graduate school at Johns Hopkins’s Peabody Institute in Baltimore. I had gone to Peabody to study architectural acoustics, and we had just used Avery Fisher and its even more ill-fated predecessor, Philharmonic Hall, as a case study of what not to do. Some of us joked that the site on which Lincoln Center stands was cursed and that the building’s sonic problems karmically originated from the mass displacement of the mostly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods of San Juan Hill and Lincoln Square. The involvement of the overhyped starchitect Thomas Heatherwick, whose farcical Vessel project neared completion at Hudson Yards, only seemed to reinforce our curse theory.

So, I’d written off David Geffen Hall, as the building was to be rechristened, the second I heard the news: it would, I thought, inevitably be architecturally banal or flamboyantly ugly, beset by delays, and come in way over budget.

Fortunately for …