Q+A: Milton Glaser

The programs at the SVA Theatre are presented by departments throughout the College and organizations from around the city. But the vision for the physical exterior and interior of the structure comes from one person: designer Milton Glaser, who has been on the SVA faculty for nearly half a century and has been serving as acting chairman since the death of founder Silas H. Rhodes in 2007.

Glaser recently sat down in the conference room at his Manhattan design firm, Milton Glaser Inc., to discuss the process and inspiration behind his design for the theater.

How did you come to be involved with the SVA Theatre project?
About 15 years ago, Silas asked me if I would design the theater. I said I’d be happy to do it, and 15 years later I got a call from David [Rhodes, SVA’s president] who said, ‘It’s time.’

How do you create a design for a building like the theater?
Well, as you know, I’m not an architect, although I’ve done a lot of architectural projects. I designed a couple hundred supermarkets for Grand Union, and then I worked with very good architects on a var-iety of projects in a sort of semi-architectural way. I did some interiors for restaurants—I designed [the restaurant] Aurora, and another restaurant opposite Carnegie Hall, called Trattoria Dell’arte.

So I’ve been involved, in one way or another, on the fringe of architectural design, and I’m willing to do it basically because I don’t know how to do it—which puts you at risk and makes it a more interesting process. I didn’t know what it meant to redesign a theater, but in this case I would say that it is on the borderline between graphics and architecture, not like a purely architectural idea.

What do you mean by that?
The theater on 23rd Street was interesting as a lobby space, which is where most of the design changes occurred, and on the marquee. And we had a simple design for the interior; I designed the floor covering for it, and from there did a kind of pro forma interior, until they started the demolition. The demolition revealed these rather extraordinary forms: the inclined ramp from the bottom of one of the auditoriums, and the discovery that we went up another eight feet on the interior at certain points. Then everything became more interesting.

In response to that discovery, we scrapped what we had originally proposed and decided to do a composite of the old pieces of the building: concrete, distressed surfaces, pipes and so on, and an intervention that would be very contradictory—bright, shiny, strong elements that play with the idea of a work in progress. That only could occur after you started working. I mean, you don’t have a preconception about something like this before you discover the peculiarities of the site.
It is very much like doing a painting. You start a painting. The painting then becomes something that you work with or against, and the painting suggests to you which way you go and what to leave out, and you’re constantly omitting things that you had thought were fine. You discover, for instance, that this little piece of red paint that you thought was so gorgeous suddenly has stopped working. And I think that’s how it goes with graphics and in everything else, which is you start one way and the work leads you to something else.

We think it's going to become a kind of neighborhood icon.
– Milton Glaser

What about the outside of the building?
The outside of the building is very interesting. We looked at one of the great objects of constructivist thinking, Vladimir Tatlin’s famous Monument to the Third International. One of the great iconic works of modernism, it never went beyond a proposal. The model is about 15 feet tall, and it was supposed to be a building that integrated architecture and technology and everything else.

I thought it would be fun to take an icon of modernism and use it for our façade. It’s three cylinders and they revolve in space so you get this cross-hatching in motion, I hope, of the verticals and the horizontal diagonals going around. It’s going to revolve on the hour, and it’ll serve as a clock; on the marquee, it’ll say it’s one o’clock, with a pithy saying like `Time to rethink your life’ or something. We have an assortment of 100 different sayings. We think it’s going to become a kind of neighborhood icon.
The rest of the façade is going to be a singular work of design or art. We have about 100 quotes on ‘The Secret of Art,’ which is a derivation of a poster I did last year. It’s a big thing and is intended to change two or three times a year, and each time to be a vibrant sort of big mural billboard that will serve as an event for the neighborhood.

Because you’re designing something that’s going to join the visual landscape of an established and busy residential neighborhood, were there specific considerations that you had to pay attention to because of that location?
Well, one of the considerations was that the lighting at night should not be so intrusive that people across the way would be disturbed by it. Outside of that, we’ll just attempt to be a good neighbor. The theater is what it is, which is a big, long building.

Is there a ‘voice’ that you’re hoping the façade will speak in to the people who see it on a regular basis?
Well, it depends what we want to use it for. You know, we’ve done some posters for the College where there’s a social or political intention. And there is that sense that if one wants to use [the theater] to address concerns like that, it would be useful. Another way to do it is to think of it as a mural that you would give to a single artist to do, that would exist for six or eight months, and then go away. It’s an opportunity to redefine what a billboard is.

Are there visual landmarks or ideas about the visual history of New York City that you considered in your design or that are important to you?
I can’t say I did, no. One of the characteristics of the city is that it is both harmonious in some of its characteristics and also disharmonious in others. We’re going through an era of heroic architecture, where people want to identify the building that either they’re living in or that they’re developing, right? So they look for eccentricity or they look for a unique vision. I love that new building on the West Side that Frank Gehry did, which is totally unlike any other building in the city, but has now a kind of new definition of what a building in the city could be. But I can’t say that the history of New York’s architecture was a factor in my consideration.

I assume that one of the peculiarities of a theater space is that it needs to have its own character, but also should get out of the way of any event that’s happening there. Are there strategies for balancing those two seemingly oppositional ideas?
Well, the only thing that has to be gotten out of their way is the furniture, and what we specified is a modest sort of reductive piece of furniture that can be whisked into the back room when you need the space. Other times, you want to use the lobby as a kind of coffee house where people sit around and they discuss things and so on.
I think the most important thing is that when you go to see a movie, there’s a real transition between the outside and entering into this lobby, when suddenly you’re in a fantasy world that doesn’t look exactly like anything else outside. And I think that’s the effect: with the panels of iridescent color and the lighting and the patterning, it’ll look like an unusual place.

Can you tell me about some of the specific challenges that come with designing a physical space as opposed to designing for print media?
Well, you have to have, obviously, a dimensional sense. Clearly, not everybody has it. A lot of architects are really two-dimensional architects. Their drawings look great, and when they are translated into three dimensions they don’t seem quite right.

So a dimensional sense I think is essential—and it’s very hard to learn the meaning of space. Not only that, it’s very hard to learn the meaning of color and light in space. I remember when I used this beautiful French yellow in a restaurant I was designing, but when it went into shadow it turned into this horrible green.

Unless you really understand the atmospheric change that lights pro-duce and space produces, you can do some awful work. I think you just have to develop a sensitivity through the years, and it’s good to have gone through the experience of painting and drawing and making things look good compositionally. You know, I have this new book called Drawing is Thinking, and there is no better preparation for either architecture or graphics than learning how to draw, because it’s all about paying attention to what you’re doing.

I know that one of the spaces in the theater is going to be named in memory of Silas Rhodes. You were a very close friend and colleague of Mr. Rhodes.
Yes, one of the auditoriums is ‘Silas.’ The other one is ‘Beatrice’ [named for Mr. Rhodes’ wife].

Did your relationship with him inform any of your work on this space?
Well, that’s a complex question. I would say doing it at all and being part of it has so much to do with my relationship with Silas. He was not only a friend, but he was a great mentor and supporter of my ideas and my work.

You know, you go through life, and you discover that there are key people—maybe five or eight or so—who basically have fundamentally changed your life in some way. Silas was certainly one of them for me. He supported all the things I wanted to do with the school. He picked me up, said, ‘You come and teach.’ I’ve been there for over 50 years—a long, long time. And I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without Silas. I mean, he was one of the great influences on my life. He was an irrepressible and a unique man, and I’ve never met anyone like him.