Date of Sketch: August 9, 1997
As exuberant as Berlioz’ Roman Carnivalb Overture, Turin’s New Symphony Hall would become the new home of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra. Reflected in the River Po adjacent to Turin’s Parco della Confluenza, the new hall builds on cultural successes of Italy’s second largest city and provides regional counterpoint to Milan’s world famous La Scala.
Date of Sketch: August 17, 2018
There is nothing modest or cautious about Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony. Its premiere was postponed 25 years for political reasons. So nothing less ambitious in architectural terms could begin to reflect the Symphony’s formidable sound. Thus, the spiny office/hotel tower takes cues from La Paz’ desert climate and indigenous cactus to provide deep shade for windows and balconies of the Saguaro Tower’s faćade.
Date of Sketch: July 7, 2017
In this case a 9-story apartment building is scaled as if it were taller and denser by exaggerating the slenderness and number of verticals. Multiple balconies are intended to amplify scale as do the building's illusory multiple entrances. By filling the corner site at S 5th St & Warren St it would strengthen Hudson’s ongoing redevelopment.
Date Of Sketch: July 22, 2018
The architectural subject matter was drawn entirely from listening to Thomas Adès’ Suite “Powder Her Face,” which characterizes in a musical composition the opulent and dissolute lifestyle of the real-life Duchess of Argyll. No one to celebrate or emulate he borrows or “steals” freely from a number of musical sources and synthesizes them into his own unique composition. Attempting to reflect what I heard musically transformed Adès’ composition into a seriously frivolous kind of architecture.
Date of Sketch: February 10, 2018
Sean Shepard's recent work "Express Abstractionism" for orchestra (2017) premiered a soundscape projecting music into an aural future. If, in Goethe's terms, "architecture is frozen music" then architecture is fixed, but when music and architecture are intertwined, they are both dynamic in time and space.
The Space Horizon creates its own local gravity in various orientations.
Date of Sketch: January 27, 2018
A concrete structure clad in quarried lava imagines a cliffside retreat on the way to the mountain. Ligeti's Violin Concerto rises in subtly shifting textures and harmonics to a musical peak before returning homeward in uneven rhythmic tones. In the drawing I try to capture the sound.
Date of Sketch: September 17, 2017
Hearing the achingly beautiful slow movement of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2 recalls the aural mood created by the King in one of his first iconic threnodies. The glass tower thus inspired is clad in a "tonal" range of grays to intensify the hotel's angular form, echoing in silhouette Elvis' performing style. "The desk clerks dressed in black."
from program notes ~ Songwriter Tommy Durden was inspired to write the lyrics from a newspaper story about a man who leapt from his hotel room window committing suicide and leaving behind nothing but a note that said “I walk a lonely street”.
Date of Sketch: January 13, 2018
Proposed for Bangkok's Lumphini Park is an exhibition center for the fabrics and textiles of Toray's advanced research. Situated high above Bangkok's central garden, the Innovation Museum, as in Stravinsky's Firebird, evokes the alchemy of a magical creature, the Firebird, and the legendary sorcerer Kashchei, who in this case will summon Innovation.
Date of Sketch: July 31, 2008
As the second work on the program, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 in C became one example of new, densely rich, intricate, and grand works which characterized the twelve piano concertos of his late twenties. They became as expressive as his symphonies, and hearing this one inspired this sketch. The interwoven structure of concrete, steel and glass is half open and half enclosed as it mimics the tree canopy which serves as an aerial display for exotic orchids and bromeliads. The restaurant accompanies diners on the first and second levels of the building.
Date of Sketch: August 21, 2009
On April 2, 1800, Beethoven began to transform the sound of symphonic music with the first performance of his First Symphony. But as familiar as it seems today, it must have been both surprising and puzzling to the first audiences. So it is with libraries which are evolving at the pace of technological change to become informational cornucopias. The New Media Library, contains everything from books to theaters, transmitting knowledge in an electrochromic glass environment which can be darkened or lightened, modified to support the transfer of information.