The Philadelphia School architect Romaldo Giurgola died this year, after a lengthy and distinguished career in architecture. The Italian-born architect is probably most famous for the Australian Parliament Building in Canberra, but his formative years were in Philadelphia and environs, working with Ehrman Mitchell. Mitchell/Giurgola’s 1973 Lang Music Building at Swarthmore College marks one step in his transition from strict modernism to something else. It was too early to call it “post-modernism” and in fact that is not where Giurgola was headed anyway. For Romaldo Giurgola the Swarthmore campus, situated in a nationally-recognized arboretum, could not have been more different from the Columbia University campus in New York City, where he had taken the position as head of the architecture department. The Lang Music Building is a place where music is made and where audiences come to experience it, as well as a place where the making of music and dance is studied. The ephemeral and temporal nature of music informs the spaces, which include gathering (and informal performance) space, practice spaces, a music and dance library, and a more formal performance space. The main performance space is, itself, a performance, fusing the music and dance on the stage with the sylvan view beyond, through 20-foot high windows at the back of the stage. The backdrop changes as the day grows late, and as the seasons revolve. A sense of play is apparent in many aspects of this room: the split-audience seating arrangement and the lack of wings that removes the possibility of a dignified entrance to the stage by performers. Giurgola seems to have willfully played with the rules of modernism in creating this building. Meanwhile the performance space has superb acoustics. Over 40 years later musicians are thrilled to perform in this space despite its quirkiness.
About the presenterLinton D Stables
Until 2014 Linton Stables was a Senior Associate at Perkins Eastman Architects in New York where he was the Chief of Specifications. A member of the Construction Specifications Institute since 1985, he is a past president of the Metropolitan New York Chapter. He is an Associate Member of the AIA and is a LEED Accredited Professional. Linton received his B.A. in Architecture from Rice University and pursued graduate studies in architecture at Virginia Tech.