The grand theme of the redevelopment currently under way at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is openness and transparency. Travertine walls will be torn out and replaced with glass. West 65th Street, once a dark tunnel, will be a light-filled “Street of the Arts,” with entrances to Lincoln Center Theater and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. More seating, more dining options, and free Wi-Fi will — the institution’s leaders hope — encourage people to linger on the Lincoln Center campus.

At a briefing yesterday on the progress of redevelopment, another theme emerged, which could be a premonition of one future direction of urban design: a marriage of advanced technology and reclaimed green space. With its “infopeels,” “infoblades,” and scrolling LED text, the new Lincoln Center will be an arts complex for the Internet age. But the design will also reinsert into the dense urban landscape some patches of nature: a grass-roofed restaurant, a grove of 30 plane trees, a moss-walled Harmony Atrium. A little bit of Times Square, a little bit of Central Park.

From early on, the high -tech visual elements have been one of the most striking features of the redesign, which is being carried out by the architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with FXFowle Architects. These elements will include LED text scrolling along the steps at the entrances on Columbus Avenue and on 65th Street; networked screens along 65th Street, which the architect Elizabeth Diller has dubbed “infoblades,” showcasing programming at the different constituent venues, and an interactive infopeel in front of Alice Tully Hall, where would-be audience members can look up information about programs, times, and ticket availability. All the information and visuals will be controlled from a central “brain” on the concourse level of Lincoln Center.

Asked if she thought the amount of visual information would be overwhelming to the visitor, Ms. Diller said, “There’s so much information bombarding us all the time; I think we’re good at distilling it.” The text scrolling on the stairs and the visuals on the infoblades, she said, are intended less as a source of information than to create a level of energy around the campus. “They make for a buzz,” she said.

The West 65th Street Project, which is under way, includes the addition of significant green space: Besides the sloping lawn on the roof of the new restaurant, there will be a grove of trees, with plentiful seating beneath them. In the design of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the Harmony Atrium, a public-private space that runs from Broadway to Columbus Avenue between 62nd and 63rd Streets, would become an indoor garden, with some walls covered in moss and others with streams of water. Stone benches will offer a place to sit and rest. Ms. Tsien said the design for the atrium, which will also include interactive screens and a discount ticket facility, is an attempt to combine “the exhilaration of the fast world — and some calm juice.” (The design for the Harmony Atrium is provisional and has yet to be approved by the City Planning Commission.)

Even certain aspects of the interior design are inspired by nature. Describing the wood surface that will clad the interior of the new Alice Tully Hall, which will have the capacity to glow right before the performance begins, Ms. Diller noted that the concept was inspired by the phosphorescence of marine microorganisms.

The total redevelopment project is estimated to cost $900 million and is scheduled for completion by the 2009–2010 season. Lincoln Center announced this week that it has raised $482 million of its $702 million share. (The rest of the funds are being raised by the constituent organizations.) At a gala Monday night called “Good Night Alice,” which bid goodnight to Alice Tully Hall for 18 months of construction work, Lincoln Center’s chairman, Frank Bennack Jr., plugged a new seat-naming campaign, in which donors can honor their families or friends by putting their name on seats in the redesigned hall.

In the next 18 months, the hall’s opaque travertine facade will be replaced with a glass curtain wall. (Ms. Diller showed a photograph of a mock-up of the wall that is being tested in Germany; it has been pelted with water and subjected to conditions that mimic 90 mph winds.) A glass-walled Juilliard School dance studio will be suspended over the entrance, so that passers by — or people who want to pause on the new bleachers in front of Alice Tully — can watch the dancers as they practice. The interior will also be transformed, with new performance equipment, an expanded back of the house, and improved acoustics.

The second stage of redevelopment, the Promenade Project, which is set to begin in the next two months, will provide Lincoln Center with a new, ceremonial entrance. The drop-off lane will be diverted below ground, leaving a more attenuated staircase, framed on each side by glass canopies. The plaza will be repaved and waterproofed, and the iconic fountain, too, will be spiffed up: The water will be depressed to the level of the plaza, and the rim of the fountain made to float so that the water is visible beneath it. Additionally, Ms. Diller promised that the water shooting skyward will be able to do new magic tricks.