The Juilliard School (New York City, New York)

 university, 1969_construction, Modern (architecture)

5-story modernist school originally completed in 1969. Designed by Pietro Belluschi, its brutalist form was transformed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in association with FXFOWLE Architects in 2009, when The Irene Diamond Building was merged with Alice Tully Hall into a single structure.

Juilliard is a performing arts conservatory established in 1905. The school trains about 850 undergraduate and graduate students in dance, drama, and music. It is widely regarded as one of the world's leading music and dance schools, with some of the most prestigious arts programs.

The Juilliard School building sits along the west side of Broadway, between 65th and 66th Streets (across the street from Avery Fisher Hall and the Lincoln Center parking garage). Prior to its expansion, it maintained a rectangular footprint of approximately 200 x 350 feet. Construction on the Juilliard building began in 1965. At the east end, Alice Tully Hall was built as a chamber music venue, seating 1,086 patrons. As Juilliard’s main public theater, Alice Tully Hall was not given a prominent entrance, despite the fact that it was housed in the only Lincoln Center building on a site directly facing Broadway. The entrance was instead tucked under the second-story outdoor terrace/footbridge and the monumental exterior staircase that led up to it from the plaza. In all, the school contains three theaters (the Rosemary and Meredith Wilson Theater, the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, and the Stephanie P. McClelland Drama Theater), as well as the Paul Recital Hall, Morse Recital Hall, the public Alice Tully Hall, 15 large dance, opera, and drama studios, 3 organ studios, 84 practice rooms, 27 classrooms and ensemble studios, 30 private instruction studios, numerous orchestra and choral rehearsal rooms, scenery and costume studios and workshops, a library, lounge, snack bar, and administration offices. The theaters and working floors are tied together by a West 65th Street vestibule-lobby that rises several stories, allowing one to orient oneself upon entering the building.

The Juilliard building, set on a regular structural grid, was designed in steel and concrete with a travertine veneer (for which the material was donated by the Italian government). The expansion of the Juilliard Building created a 3-story all-glass lobby and sunken plaza beneath a new, cantilevered extension at the corner of Broadway. In keeping with the Brutalist style, Juilliard features rigorous geometries and highly cantilevered forms. Diller Scofidio + Renfro and FXFOWLE extended the travertine cladding of the original building along the West 65th Street facade, and also created an adapted extension of the Brutalist geometries on the upper stories. The fourth-story row of recesses housing windows is extended, but with the glass displaced and extending beyond the recesses, differentiating the extension from the original building and subtly beginning to break the original Brutalist box. The Juilliard extension cantilevers over a sunken public plaza and a new 38-foot-6-inch-high glazed lobby. The underside of the extension tilts up at a 16-degree angle. A dance studio punches through the curtain wall, overlooking Broadway. The transparency of the entry makes it feel like an extension of the Broadway sidewalk. A grandstand of bleacher-style seating on the far corner of the plaza rises at a similar angle to the canopy. Structural glazed walls bring daylight into three stories of rehearsal space and classrooms in the extension, and the protruding dance studio is suspended beneath its soffit. East-west running trusses were installed between the third and sixth levels to carry the load for the four floors of the expansion, the longest of which has a 75-foot back span with a 50-foot cantilever.

The main entrance to the Irene Diamond Building (including the entrance to the smaller theaters and recital halls) is closer to the center on 65th Street, with four sets of glass double-doors and a revolving door set in the green-tinted glass-clad ground floor. The stone band above the ground floor angles upward over across the main entrance, with the glass extending up through the 2nd floor here. Along the rest of the south facade, the 2nd & 3rd floors have eight wide bays of windows, each six panes across. At the west end, the ground floor recesses back at an angle, and a stairway with glass side rails rises sideways to the west, cutting up through the stone extension of the ground floor's roof where the glass below recedes. It emerges onto a landing that connects with the adjoining Samuel B. and David Rose Building, with a metal and glass skybridge extending out across 65th Street to connect with The Vivian Beaumont Theater on the main Lincoln Center campus.

The upper two floors of the Juilliard School cantilever over the lower floors. The 4th floor has 29 bays of large, recessed windows, and at the east end they separate into offsetting and various sized windows in upper and lower levels. The top floors has a uniform row of smaller square windows extending across the full south facade.

At the east facade facing Broadway, the top two floor (which cantilever sharply above the base) have a curtain wall of green glass. The top two floors on the north facade have the same windows as on the south (smaller square openings on the 5th floor, and larger, recessed ones on the 4th, except that these extend all the way across, unlike the east end of the south facade where they alter their form. These two floors are again cantilevered above the lower floors. The open expanse of green glass at the east end angles down and up to a point toward the west, where the more regular form of the lower three floors continues along 66th Street. There are several freight entrances at the ground floor, followed by the Alice Tully Hall stage doors, and a glass storefront for The Juilliard Store, followed by a wider freight entrance, service doors, and then seven bays of poster boxes at the west end. The 2nd & 3rd floors are set back from the ground floor, creating a walkway on the 2nd floor. These two floors have a couple wide bands of large windows, but they don't extend all the way across the facade. There are no opening in the center or west end.

www.juilliard.edu/