The fountain (rebuilt by the team that did the Bellagio) comes to life.   (Photo: Connie Zhou)

You can read the tug-of-war between monumentality and openness in the architecture. Philip Johnson turned the State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater) inward, focusing attention on the ample promenade and the auditorium’s gilded ceiling, and fronting the avenue with a featureless slab. Max Abramowitz conceived of Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall as a luminous box inside a cage of slender columns. For the Met, Harrison was forced to tamp down his desire for an exotic arrangement of barrel vaults and sweeping forms, and instead produced a simpler structure with a spare arcade and a cramped lobby. The years have cloaked Lincoln Center’s disparate parts in the illusion of harmony, but beneath the patina is an enforced collision of aesthetics, glued together by budget cuts and compromise.

The task of rejuvenating the aging complex has fallen to the firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who got the job because they weren’t itching to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch. Instead, they are treating the buildings with clarity, tenderness, and, when it’s needed, unsentimental rigor. West 65th Street is slowly donning a new identity as a livable thoroughfare, lined with marquees, theater lobbies, and a series of freestanding video screens parading down the newly generous sidewalk. The oppressive bridge is gone, to be replaced by a graceful glass-and-steel one. The route from city to box office will become a more festive procession. As for the plaza itself, the dancing jets of water in the sleeker round fountain have been choreographed by Wet Design, which built the aquatic spectacular at the Bellaggio in Las Vegas. (They’ve promised a more tasteful routine here.)

I am counting on these interventions to unmix my feelings about Lincoln Center. Eventually, I should want to arrive earlier and stick around after the final curtain. “I’m hoping there will be a shift toward a more social culture of theatergoing,” says the architect Elizabeth Diller. “And I hope that Lincoln Center’s public spaces become a destination, a scene.”

I tested that hope on a recent afternoon, pausing to join a lunchtime crowd on the bleachers in front of Alice Tully and hear an a cappella chorus. A couple of hours later, I stopped again to hear a brass band serenading Broadway. One day, I might even arrange to meet someone here for a meal, either in the restaurant that’s being inserted into the plaza in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theater or on the undulating lawn on top. The double-decker structure, designed as carefully for brown-bag lunches as for big dinners, is the renovation’s most aggressive act. The canopy dips to plaza level at one corner and rises to a peak at another, ravaging the minimalist symmetry of the old North Plaza. The sere garden that the restaurant replaces, by the landscape architect Dan Kiley, was a theoretical success and a practical failure—perfect, poised, empty.

In renderings, the new swooping green plane had a whimsical feel, like a fantasy of a flying meadow that would remain in the plans until some levelheaded administrator finally struck it. But there it is, cresting surreally above the construction fence. It reverses the relationship of enclosure to structure: This isn’t a restaurant with a green roof, it’s a rolling landscape enfolding a room. A stand of trees has been planted on the other shore of the reflecting pool, with a stone bench running along the corridor of shade. The new glade captures the mix of glamour and informality that the center always meant to foster.

Fifty is a tough age for a building: old enough for skin to slacken and innards to struggle, not yet venerable enough for immortality. But the anniversary coincides with a surge of Camelot chic, exemplified by the slick glamour of Mad Men, the stylish anomie of Revolutionary Road, and the fad for narrow-legged, thin-lapelled suits. At another time, the appetite for wholesale renewal might have proved irresistible, and we might have lost the chance to refresh rather than replace. Lincoln Center’s administrators might have voted to strip off the pitted travertine and replace it with more rugged limestone. They briefly considered draping the plaza in a rippled glass canopy like a permanent wedding tent. They could have followed the conductor George Szell’s advice when he first encountered Philharmonic Hall: “Tear it down and start over!” Instead, they decided to act radically at the margins.

The change is embodied, for me, by the new staircase that rises gently from Columbus Avenue. The old drop-off lane, a treacherous river of traffic that cut between stairs and plaza, has vanished, to reopen safely underground. The subtle alteration shows the care with which the architects are stitching the campus to the city and at the same time preserving its separateness. Now, once I cross the threshold, the pedestrian experience remains inviolate. I find myself slowing down. The rhythm of the stairs imposes a stateliness of pace. You can’t easily bound up them on the way to the box office, or thunder down to grab a cab. The staircase acts an anteroom, separating the fantastical realm of the stage from the reality lurking at the curb. When Lincoln Center opened, critics accused it of dowdy design, backward-looking values, and diluted modernism. Ah, but it was so much older then; it’s younger than that now.

Related:

• Articles by Justin Davidson
• Table of Contents: May 18, 2009 issue of New York | Subscribe!