Morning Report - News from Oct. 2, 2002

THE ARTS

Lincoln Center Seeks Architect to Shape Space

Officials at New York’s Lincoln Center, looking for a designer to shape 6.3 acres of public space as part of a $1.2-billion redevelopment effort, have invited five architects to submit proposals.

Twelve resident companies share the 16-acre Lincoln Center site, including the Juilliard School, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the New York City Opera and the New York Philharmonic, and the complex’s individual venues will conduct separate architectural competitions.

The first of those is Avery Fisher Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic, which expects to name an architect in November.

The public-space invitation to architects calls for designers to form teams, each including a master planner and landscape architect, along with graphics and lighting consultants.

A winner is to be chosen in December. The five invited architects are:

* Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish designer whose work includes an addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum that was completed last year.

* Cooper Robertson & Partners, a New York firm whose work includes campus plans for Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.; and the master plan for the community of Celebration, Fla.

* Diller & Scofidio, a New York husband-and-wife team who recently won the assignment of designing a new home for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio in 1999 shared a MacArthur “genius” fellowship.

* Foster & Partners, the London-based firm, led by Sir Norman Foster, that designed the new German Parliament in Berlin and is working on a new Hearst Corp. headquarter building in New York.

* Richard Meier, New York-based designer of the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Spain.

The Meier and Foster firms are among the finalists for the Avery Fisher Hall job (along with Madrid-based Jose Rafael Moneo, designer of L.A.’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels). They’re also among the six design teams vying to redesign the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.

*

Famed Printmaker Gives Art to Rutgers

Artist June Wayne, who revived printmaking in the 1960s at her famed Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, has donated 3,325 artworks valued at $5.47 million to the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

The gift includes 2,555 prints and four tapestries by Wayne; the rest were created by 128 other artists who have worked with her. Two hundred of the donated prints will be sold at auction in New York on Nov. 21 to benefit the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper.

To further enhance its status as a hub of modern printmaking, Rutgers also has appointed Wayne a research professor at the university. She will lecture, work with students and create work with the center’s staff of printers, typographers and papermakers.

*

POP/ROCK

Repairs to Begin

at El Rey Theatre

Repairs at the El Rey Theatre are expected to begin next week, but the theater’s owner said Tuesday that the busy concert venue will probably remain closed for the rest of October.

The damage occurred Sept. 15 when a production company filming a Faith Hill performance for a TV special overloaded a ceiling truss with lighting, said Rodney Nardi, the owner of the 1936 building in the Miracle Mile district.

Several concerts have been canceled or relocated since the incident. No announcement has been made about the Bright Eyes concerts scheduled for Oct. 10 and 11. Other shows still on this month’s schedule include Tammy Faye Bakker, Sweden’s (International) Noise Conspiracy and an electroclash package featuring Peaches and Chicks on Speed.

*

TELEVISION

Fox News Channel Bests Cable Rivals for Viewers

The Fox News Channel remained the most-watched cable news channel in the third quarter, continuing the dominance it first attained at the beginning of the year. It was the only news channel to add viewers, compared to a year earlier, when all cable news outlets showed a surge in viewing because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

According to Nielsen Media Research figures released Tuesday, Fox’s average number of viewers for a day in July, August and September was 626,000, up 23% from a year earlier. CNN had an average 516,000 viewers, down 26% from the third quarter of 2001 (although the network said that if the post-Sept. 11 period is factored out from last year, it gained 54%).

MSNBC, with an average 250,000 viewers, was off 35%.

*

KCBS-TV Moving Up

Its Midday Newscast

KCBS-TV Channel 2 will shift its midday weekday newscast from noon to 11 a.m. next week to avoid overlap with the noon newscast on sister station KCAL-TV Channel 9. That means the jointly operated Viacom stations together will offer 11 hours of local news programming each weekday, none of it overlapping.

To accommodate the change, KCBS will move the soap opera “The Young and the Restless” from an 11 a.m. start to 11:30.

*

QUICK TAKES

AFI Fest 2002 will pay tribute to Michael Caine with screenings of six of his older films Nov. 11-13 at the Skirball Cultural Center and with a showing of his latest, “The Quiet American,” at ArcLight Hollywood on Nov. 17.... Jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman’s show tonight at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood has been canceled, but he will perform there as scheduled Thursday.