A fugue in music involves multiple intertwined voices moving towards and away from each other, which seems an apt way to describe our approach to the design of a new headquarters for Community MusicWorks. Nationally celebrated, (CMW) is centered on building connections with and between members of the community, and offering a cohesive educational and performance experience for residents of the Providence area, especially under served families and neighborhoods.

The site is a skewed parallelogram located in the heart of the community. A skewed parallelogram can be understood as an overlapping of two rectangles—one rotated in respect to the other. Two sides of each rectangle form the four
skewed sides of the parallelogram.  This became the design diagram. It inherently holds a centripetal and centrifugal organization. The building has a centripetal organization that pulls students, neighborhood families and music lovers in and a centrifugal order sends the organization out into the community. The overlap of the two rectangles and smaller resulting overlaps produce triangular wedges throughout. Some wedges became practice spaces that project outward over the sidewalk, some became tier seating for spontaneous recitals, some benches to pause; others became skylights bringing the light through the building. The prismatic performance hall became the center piece that separates from the adjacent floor plates, opening a dramatic three-story skylit wedge of space referred to as “the shard”. A student lounge at the shard’s base adjoins the lower practice area with over a dozen practice pods for individual and paired practices. Acoustic glazing provides multiple oblique views into and out of the performance space; these surprising apertures offer glimpses through spaces, for example, from the balcony stair to
the children’s lounge, another through a second-floor classroom, through the performance hall and into the cafe, joining performance with learning and practice. Other programs activating the lower level include a music locker area, a luthier workshop and an experimental electronic music studio.
The building is horizontally clad in responsibly sourced Ipe, a dense tropical hardwood, consistent with the Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) construction and the neighboring painted wooden buildings. Syncopated windows placed higher and lower for both children and adults, play across the facade like notes on sheet music staff. The upper wedges extend over both streets and rear
covering entries and projecting the parallelogram geometries of the intersecting streets,
creating an architectural transparency of the urban block.

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