DAVID

H.

KOCH

THEATER

BOX

OFFICE

Creating an intervention to temporarily serve as a new box office for the David H. Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theater) grappled with the challenge to represent the building’s dual identity as home to two of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ resident organizations: the New York City Opera and the New York City Ballet. Both claimed the building as their own and shared the calendar year in staggered sessions.

A thirty-three foot long and fifteen foot tall screen provided a new plane of transaction and also functioned as a billboard. The building’s double identity served as a design trigger: the wall employed a Dada technique known as the Lincoln-Wilson effect that relied on the interlacing of two distinct images on alternating sides of an accordion-folded vertical plane. The presentation of the theater’s two constituents - their identities represented by images of signature artists - were seen frontally as a double image, and obliquely as one or the other.

Using digital photos and a new CNC milling technique, it was possible to create a three-dimensional photographic effect using Corian (an acrylic solid surface) as the base material. The gray scale of the original image emerged by varying the depth of the scored material, allowing light to modulate through thicker and thinner areas. The wall surface was uniformly illuminated from behind by six thousand LED point sources, and simultaneously grazed frontally by a shower of downlights emphasizing the contours.

The glowing wall lured visitors in from Josie Robertson Plaza. Upon approach, the opera and ballet legends were seen simultaneously. When patrons parted to either side of the central axis and ascended the stairs to the upper lobby, the interleaved images separated and fused into two singular images.