Leading-edge glass design enlightens the Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall renovation

SentryGlas® helped W&W Glass engineer a frameless leading edge for the Alice Tully Hall renovation, adding to its feeling of openness.

Architect Diller, Scofidio, & Renfro transforms 40-year-old design into a new “grand opening” on Broadway, made with high-strength SentryGlas® ionoplast interlayer.

The New York arts community is turning inside-out to celebrate a dramatic change of scenery at the Lincoln Center's renovated Alice Tully Hall and Julliard Building. Once seen by many as imposing and bunker-like, the building entrance has been lifted, cantilevered and opened into a inviting "Grand Foyer." The popular new gathering place helps set the tone for continued development of a "Street of the Arts" at the Lincoln Center.

The redesign at 65th and Broadway literally suspends belief. It transforms the venue into a floating performance hall, jutting out like the prow of a ship, riding on a wave of clear, mullionless glass. The building's all-glass entranceway and facade are made with SentryGlas® in a Pilkington Planar® system installed by W&W Glass.

Challenging both size and fixturing limitations of the past, the new facade features individual laminated glass lites up to 4.88 m (16 ft) tall, tiled together to create a vast, wideopen expanse of glass that brings the outside in, and artfully blends people and activities from the street scene, to the performance hall.

"Our challenge was to engineer as tall and open a facade as possible, including a frameless glass that's more than 13.8 m (45 ft) tall at the leading edge," explains Jeff Haber at W&W Glass. Haber's firm specializes in point-supported facades and has been an early adopter of new glass strength and planarity made possible by SentryGlas®.

The result is a truly grand opening that puts SentryGlas® at yet another widely popular Manhattan arts-related destination. (Another recently completed SentryGlas® project in Manhattan is the gem-like, all-glass TKTS booth at Times Square, where visitors line up for same-day Broadway show tickets.)

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