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 intuitive sculpting and terraforming go hand in hand to unfold and re-stitch the building as a catalytic participant in the remaking of the city? Given the need for innovative types of gathering, how will the consideration of the landform inspire the auditoria themselves, the shape of the seating bowls, or the spaces that support them?

Located in a developing area of the Boston waterfront, the project stands at the intersection of 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 theaters 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 that 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.