Saarinen's original parti for the 1,060-seat Beaumont theater and the 299-seat Newhouse space tucked into the basement had been complicated by its interlocking relationship with the adjoining New York Public Library and Museum of Performing Arts, designed in 1965 by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. While the library has its own entrance pavilion on the south between the Metropolitan Opera House and the theater, the Beaumont's travertine-clad attic conceals the library's book stacks and reading rooms, placed in a square doughnut wrapping around the stage house. Bunshaft's insistence that the Beaumont's concrete columns at the base be few but stalwart disgruntled Saarinen, yet generated a commanding bridgelike structural solution. Massive concrete girders, 18 feet high with an I-beam profile, stretch across the Beaumont for a 175-foot span. Decades later, Hardy and structural engineer Severud Associates would place another long-span steel-truss structure on top to contain a 23,000-square-foot, 112-seat theater. In so doing, H3 pulled the new rectilinear addition 58 feet back from the Beaumont's roof edge both to create an outdoor terrace off the LCT3 lobby and to mitigate the perceived mass of the new 32-foot-high structure when seen from Lincoln Center's north plaza in front of the Beaumont building. “We wanted the steel trusses of the box to have their own identity, yet complement Saarinen's travertine-marble-clad attic sitting on a glass void,” H3 partner Ariel Fausto explains. “That structural conversation is important.”

To lessen the glare on the addition's glazed walls, the architects designed an aluminum screen of square tubes turned at a 45-degree angle. During the day the screen filters light, and at night it becomes a diaphanous veil. The large existing concrete columns allowed H3 to insert two elevator cabs housed in a shaft of channel glass on the south side of the building. All the firm needed to do was to remove three coffers from the concrete deck in the Beaumont's ceiling structure.

Upon arriving at the new upper lobby for the black-box performance space (called the Claire Tow Theater), visitors find a café, which opens onto the terrace. Inside, the theater's fixed seats are upholstered in red, giving the space, with its exposed ceiling, a dramatic punch. The glazed-bar building also contains both a rehearsal room and, above it, administrative offices on the north end.

Preservationists feared that Hardy's addition would mar the quiet monumentality of the Saarinen theater. They needn't have worried. As it turns out, Saarinen's late work is served well by this subtle expansion. It may seem ironic that Hardy would return to a purer Miesian Modernism for this theater, since he had been intent at one time on scrappily playing with the style. But this project proved a wise regeneration for the Beaumont building and for Saarinen's contribution. As Hardy says, “The logic of what we did comes from what he did.”