Music, Dislocation, and Landscape: CWM Residence

2021

Architects:

BOCA, Ignacio Cardona

Design Team:

Ignacio Cardona, Iliana Germán, Manuel Barrios, Yabeth Bautista, Jesús Goncalves, María Isabel González, Yabeth Bautista, Dayelis Salcedo

Client:

Paul Desenne and Family

Location:

Waltham, Massachusetts, USA

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Designed for cellist and composer Paul Desenne and his family, the renovation explores music as a generator of architectural form. While the house maintains the familiar image of a traditional New England residence toward the street, its geometry progressively dislocates toward the backyard, opening domestic spaces to the landscape and a public ravine along the rear boundary. The formal strategy draws inspiration from the radically misassembled house in Buster Keaton and Edward F. Kline’s One Week (1920).

This dislocation reorganizes the interior around spaces for gathering, music, and performance while creating nonparallel surfaces that benefit the acoustic environment by reducing reverberation. The house becomes a negotiation between convention and experimentation: conventional toward the neighborhood, increasingly open, irregular, and connected to landscape toward the ravine.