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URBANE
ACCLAIMED FOR INTERPRETIVE RESTORATION, HARDY HOLZMAN PFEIFFER ASSOCIATES SEES HISTORY IN THE REMAKING. BY ROGER YEE
RENEWAL
IF YOUR IDEA OF historic renovation is Colonial Williamsburg, you probably haven't visited the BAM Harvey Theatre (formerly the Majestic) in Brooklyn, New York. The structure began life in 1903 as a neighborhood theater and was reborn as a movie palace and a house of worship before being transformed in 1987 into a performing arts hall for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. BAM Harvey isa hauntingly beautiful restoration that earlier occupants might have trouble recognizing. Instead of reprising one of its earlier states, the theater captures the moment when it was rescued from disintegration. Peeling layers of paint, crumbled plaster, and new construction blend together with pleasing distress so that the architecture is itself a performance as well as a backdrop, an enactment of time's impact on space.
The handiwork ofthe eminent architecture firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates (HHPA), BAM Harvey is one of many examples of why HHPA remains amongthe most original and accomplished practitioners of historic renovation as well as ground-up construction nearly four decades after the firm was established by Hugh Hardy, FAIR, Malcolm Holzman, FAIR, and Norman Pfeiffer, FAIA. HHPA pursues a fiercely nonideological vision of modernism that architectural historians often struggle to classify. As the partners declared in a 1993 essay, "A Process of Conscious Choice," their firm has set two goals for itself in lieu of constructinga theoretical framework: "One has been to explore new ways to define and employ the elements of architecture: plans based on rotated grids; enclosures whose sections are incongruent with their plans; industrial products used as materials for finished surfaces; the imagery of incomplete buildings and fragmented interiors. The other goal has been to integrate new buildings into a continuity of architectural expression....while still communicating an awareness of the present."
The firm's story began modestly yet imaginatively when Hardy started his own practice in 1962. A stage-struck graduate of Princeton University, he was first employed by the legendary stage designer Jo Mielziner to translate watercolor set designs into working drawings for the scenery shop. When Mielziner invited Hardy to assist him and the celebrated architect Eero Saarinen in developing the Vivian Beaumont Theater at...
