This short writing is about my visit to Lincoln Center. It focuses on how the lincoln center relate to the city around.

 

At first a civic center can be interpreted as an eminent land area in a community that represent an image of power, dominance, and civic unity. It usually carries space for conventions, sport events, and theatrical entertainment. The lincoln Center is a preforming art center located in Upper West side Manhattan. It’s a complex of buildings design by multiple architects. The lincoln center plan was highly attacked when they first announced it by Jane Jacobs and other Urban planners. They said that” it’s going to be a sterile island cut off from the real life of the city.” I can agree more, during my visit I saw that the center looks different from it’s surrounding, and it takes a large part of the area. With the main entrance facing broadway and the other sides sort of blocking life around it especially on both Avenues, also it’s kinda impractical to access on foot. Jane Jacob said “no neighborhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well healed and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.” clearly the center is not an example of a perfect neighborhood. The design ignores the importance of knowing how things work in the city which is short blocks, and mixed uses buildings where people can gather easily enjoying life in the neighborhood.

Nevertheless, the Lincoln Center success comes from the program his offering the people in the neighborhood around with the opera House, Dance, music etc and also because of the mass of stores, restaurants and new housing they started building around it. The building never function as an Acropolis idea but now really represents the city’s most elegant area.