Philharmonic Board Has to Man Up, Pick an Architect

Every few years, Avery Fisher Hall’s board remembers the place is really an ugly failure and stirs itself into inaction.

In 2003, the orchestra tried relocating to Carnegie Hall, in a poorly thought-out move that went nowhere. Before that, Philip Johnson’s 1976 gut job added some aesthetically hopeless zigzags that, like so many earlier and later attempts, did not fix the troubled acoustics.