New York Times, September 12, 2003

ARCHITECTURE REVIEW

Zankel Hall, Carnegie's Buried Treasure

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

A view of Carnegie Hall's new underground performance space, Zankel Hall.

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP

ZANKEL HALL may persuade you to rethink your attitude toward underground spaces. Technically, it may be in a sub-subbasement just inches away from hell. Architecturally, the new hall couldn't feel more privileged. Designed by James Stewart Polshek and Richard M. Olcott of the Polshek Partnership, the Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall is a serene, grown-up place, made for a maximum of 644 listeners who like to concentrate together at the same place and time.

Described by the architects as a mining operation as well as a design project, Carnegie Hall's new performance space sits within a cavity carved out of Manhattan schist. Parts of the bedrock are exposed, actually, in backstage areas and in a public stairwell. The sense of enclosure within the earth actually enhances the brightness and clarity that the architects have brought to the design.

Mr. Polshek has an agreeable appreciation of things French. So do I. Mr. Polshek's design for the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History suggests at least a passing familiarity with the glass walls of Jean Nouvel's Cartier Foundation in Paris. At Zankel Hall, we catch the urbane scent of Christian de Portzamparc's City of Music, also in Paris. The perfume lingers longest in the elliptical enclosure of polished Venetian plaster that surrounds the new auditorium like a cone of golden sunlight.

The hall is entered through the merest vestibule that opens off Seventh Avenue, just north of 56th Street. From there, double escalators descend to the orchestra level. Glimpses of the cone appear during the ride. The plaster's warm, lustrous finish, which bears traces of the hands that applied it, is a lovely visual overture to the live music that awaits us below. White lamp shades are refrains of the ellipsis motif.

If you have visited Mr. Portzamparc's organ recital hall at the City of Music, you will expect the Zankel auditorium to be elliptically shaped also. Surprise: it is rectangular, and the contrast with the curved, sloping walls of the plaster cone is very Polshekian. The design's formal complexity is balanced and does not appear contrived.

A luxury version of a black-box theater, the hall has the feel of a broadcasting studio, which it partly is. Periodically, the room will be used for distance learning, a closed-circuit process that will link musicians and audiences from around the world for live performances and master classes.

Forest colors set the ambience. Walls, floors and seat frames are fashioned from maple and American sycamore. The seats are upholstered in sage. We are in an outdoor clearing, in other words, a space set aside for civilized ritual.

The ceiling is regulation black box: an inverted thicket of house lights and stage lights, protruding from black metal trusses. The historically inclined will recognize a resemblance to Perpendicular Gothic, a style that has long evoked spreading foliage overhead. The receding darkness of the ceiling sets off the light wood.

The walls are formed from slatted wood panels. From certain angles, the panels look woven, giving them the appearance of tatami mats. Modern architects like Walter Gropius saw in these traditional modules of Japanese design an antecedent of their own preoccupation with industrial prefabrication. Their serene horizontality also caught the admiring eye of Frank Lloyd Wright. Mr. Polshek's debt to the modern masters is explicitly acknowledged in an upstairs corridor that leads to parterre seating, where he has placed an iconic bench of slatted wood designed by George Nelson in 1946. Staggeringly elegant wall sconces, dimly lighted by blue fiber-optic filaments, glint against the pale sycamore slats.

Zankel Hall is an industrial artifact in its own right. Apart from the excavation and construction work by the Tishman Construction Corporation, the hall itself is an intricately mechanized device that can transform itself into more seating configurations than I could find use for. Suffice it to say that the floor goes up and down, in sections or all at once, and 12 banks (or "wagons") of seats slide in and out . . . How to put it? Zankel Hall does things.

The Polshek team worked on the design with the theater architectural firm Auerbach, Pollock, Friedlander and with Jaffe Holden Acoustics. For me, the most interesting aspect of this venture will reveal itself in a few weeks, when the hall first makes use of its new distance-learning technology. Many architects today, especially younger teams, are beginning to explore the possibilities of a hybrid space in which conventional enclosures are linked together by means of advanced communication technology.

Zankel Hall may be the first place New Yorkers will have to observe and participate in this type of programming on a continuing basis. It will not be the last. We're just at the beginning of developments that are likely to revolutionize the ways people think about and plan shared social space. They will also change the way we think about cities.

Like music and dance, architecture has long been among the most interactive of the arts. At Zankel Hall, down deep in the earth, new spatial thresholds await. And could we have an old one back, please? Robert J. Harth, Carnegie Hall's executive and artistic director, mentioned to me that the Russian Tea Room is for sale again. Any takers? Must have proven track record of filling rooms with stars.