Dive Brief:
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A planned $500 million overhaul of the Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall, in New York City, has been permanently shelved in favor of a series of smaller improvements, according to The New York Times.
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Concerns over who would foot the bill and the duration the New York Philharmonic would not be able to play there prompted the change. Rather than creating a new concert venue within the existing shell, designers will use simpler elements to give the venue a more intimate feel and better acoustics.
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Geffen Hall is one of several recent New York City cultural projects to be sent back to the drawing board or scrapped altogether. The city's Metropolitan Museum of Art is delaying plans for a new, $600 million wing.
Dive Insight:
New York City is packed with cultural institutions like museums and performance halls. Those spaces rely a great deal on charitable foundations, trusts, direct donations and other forms of private support to finance the upgrades and expansions they need to keep visitors coming. Such projects sometimes receive public money, too.
In November 2015, the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, announced it had chosen a design from Chicago-based Studio Gang for the new, $325 million, 218,000-square-foot Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation. Its cave-like aesthetic earned the space plenty of comparisons in the press to The Flinstones' cartoon town of Bedrock.
Construction could start this year if the project passes several required environmental reviews. At the time of the design reveal in 2015, the museum had raised more than half of the necessary funds.
More recently, the museum announced plans to renovate its Northwest Coast Hall, where it displays and conserves roughly 1,400 artifacts from Pacific Northwest Native American cultures. The $14 million, multi-year project is slated for completion in 2020, with Culver City, CA– and Louisville, KY–based wHY as the architect.