Project: a single bedroom house for a  professional pianist. I imagined Gerald Sinclair, a devotee of Arvo Pärt, and designed the house for him. It combines inspirations from P̤ärt’s powerful Spiegal Im Spiegal and Louis Kahn’s conceptual ideas of volume.

I addressed the dual programs – living and performing – by exploring division of a single volume versus creating two distinct ones. The heavy concrete base holds all the pieces together: sometimes blending into the design as with the exposed stairs, sometimes more distinct, and sometimes almost disappearing. 

Like two separate melodies, the  body and roof relate but are independent. The soaring roof (also a sounding board)  is like a violin, while the slats are like a piano arpeggio -- single notes in a diatonic scale that varies across the façade with five whole steps (whole tones) and two half steps (semitones) in each octave, and the two half steps separated by either two or three whole steps.