STUDIO: Design III
Design III: Comprehensive Design 1
Fall 2008
Music Academy
William J. Rockwell and Matthias Altwicker Coordinators
The third year design studios explored established musical phenomena and architectural precedents to find concepts for developing a large complex conservatory program for an urban context within New York City. From the canon of architectural icons related to music education like the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Rem Koolhaas’ Casa Musica and Alvar Aalto’s House of Culture examples were investigated in terms of their internal relationships (i.e. teaching to performance) as well as urban and cultural repercussions each engender.
While some studios used elements from the precedent studies, others adapted musical phenomena to nurture a conceptual framework for their process, detailed site evaluations or combinations of both to generate components, forms, structures and adjacencies for their own proposals.
The site was a 100’ by 175’ lot at the corner of 155th Street and Broadway in Upper Manhattan surrounded by a Goodhue church, McKim Mead and White’s Audobon Terrace and the bucolic Trinity Cemetery overlooking the Hudson River. Projects relied on the analysis and prioritization of the 30,000 SF program to understand school, performance and institution in addition to other traditional appropriations.
Students discovered an approach for their designs, which was intentionally non-linear and embracing of analytic and design skills equally. The results show a spectrum of musical interests where performance and dance are as critical to education as might be rehearsal rooms merely dedicated to technique.