Water/Music

Using the program of a bicameral Performing Arts Center located on Boston’s waterfront, the project embraces the site as it transitions from terrain vague, towards a new, terraformed urbanism.  Can the architecture and remnant site infrastructure be recast as an integrated experience of land, water, space, and sensuality that regenerates a calcified, and isolated site… where an intuitive sculpting and terra-forming go hand-in-hand to unfold and re-stitch the building as a catalytic participant in the remaking of the city?  And given the need for innovative types of gathering, how will the consideration of the land form inspire the auditoria themselves, the shape of the seating bowls or the spaces which support them?

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Located in a developing area of the Boston waterfront, the project stands between landscape, urbanism and architecture, in an effort to set a new interdisciplinary approach for the renovation of an abandoned industrial area.  As host to the new Boston Music Hall and a series of associated facilities like studio theatres and performance spaces, the project aims to merge music and water. As such, the water’s edge is not strictly marked by a straight boundary, which ignores the bathymetry. Instead, the new edge is more fleeting, allowing the water to enter the site and interact playfully with the landform (in a way suggestive of the “Flyshes” of Zumbaia on the northern coast of Spain) while defining a new civic surface within the artificial landscape.