Major plans for a USD500m renovation of Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall have been scrapped.
It’s a significant setback to what would have been one of the largest cultural building projects in the US.
The heads of Lincoln Center and the New York Phiharmonic announced the reversal and said they were looking for simpler ways to transform the theatre.
The most recent plan, which had been supported in 2015 with USD100m from entertainment mogul David Geffen, would have preserved the shell of the original 1962 building, creating a new concert hall inside it.
There were questions surrounding how the project would be funded and where the NYP would reside while construction work was ongoing.
According to The New York Times, Debora L Spar, the president of Lincoln Center, said: “There was a general sense that the project had just gotten too complicated.”
In a joint interview with Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, Spar highlighted the plan’s requirement of considerable underground excavation and reconfiguration of the building’s plumbing as major drawbacks.
Borda said the construction and design teams had recently revealed they could not guarantee work would be completed within two seasons.
Borda said: “This was news — this was a genuine surprise. For the Philharmonic, the issue of being out of the hall for three years was simply profound.”