This is a proposal for a music hall located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Most often, music hall’s are programmatically bottom-heavy, meaning that their massing and relationship to the ground is bottom-weighted with social and circulation spaces. This proposal inverts this relationship, becoming vertically oriented fostering contextual continuity under and through the music hall. The vertical dislocation from the ground encourages perceptions of ascension, setting in motion a series of visual and spatial veils.
The Music Hall is developed through a series of visual and spatial veils intending to blur the distinctions between silhouette and mass, front and back, object and field, and inside / outside. A colonnade of nine arch-cut cylindrical volumes creates a confetti like figure-ground plan that prolongs the experience of threshold between the park and the music hall's interior. This colonnade not only disturbs the legibility of envelope and volume, but also prohibits an easy declaration of frontality.
The exterior materiality suggests both a process of architectural becoming and of architectural decay. Geometrically precise, yet appearing weathered to the point of cracking when taken as a whole and the lack of repetition suggest a monolithic quality of a time now past. A subtle gradient from lighter at the bottom to darker at the top assists in the top-heavy quality of the Music Hall's verticality.