WOJR Organization for Architecture: William O’Brien Jr.

Your undergraduate degree was in music theory, and we can see that influence in some of your work. Can you tell us about how music and music theory inspire your design work?

William (Liam) O’Brien: The relationship between music and architecture is tricky. There are easy and superficial ways to make comparisons. You often hear metaphors about music being used to describe architecture … “architecture is frozen music,” for example. Most of the time, those metaphors are not so useful. Where architecture and music can benefit from being thought about concurrently is in thinking about form and formats. When I studied music theory, I was looking at Bach to understand rules he followed to organize sound. There’s a lot of overlap between the way that compositions are created in terms of broadstroke forms and repetition. Interestingly, I find a lot of corollaries between spatial composition and music theory, between the ways we think about organization of space and organization of sound. More recently, questions of symmetry and asymmetry have been coming into our architectural designs, which has me thinking about earlier work of mine as a student manipulating classical forms in music.

There’s another layer to music that is not about form, but about atmosphere. When we’re producing visualizations of our designs, we think a lot about trying to conjure atmospheres through referencing music. In each project, when we’re doing art direction for the visualizations, there is usually a particular score that we’re referencing, or a film that has a unique score we are inspired by. That’s another way we’re thinking about the impact of music on our work. There are qualitative aspects of music we are interested in that can have a direct corollary to the atmosphere of the architecture we create. To give an example … Melancholy or mournfulness in some of our visualizations might be attributed to a certain score. Philip Glass is somebody who comes up a lot in our conversations, as someone who produces beautiful ambient work. We attempt to produce visualizations that convey the same quiet, meditative ambiance.

We love the image of the Mask House—the one from the bridge. It’s a beautiful image. It’s also very melancholy. What was the score for that image?

In visualizations for the Mask House, we weren’t talking about a score, but about the film The Revenant. It’s dark, but in a different way—not so much because of the narrative, but because of the tonality. The mournfulness, something about the way that it’s lit … Apparently no artificial lights were used in most if not all of that film. It likely made for a cinematographer’s nightmare, but the lighting effects are really distinct from other films that try to do something similar. We were trying to capture something like that in the Mask House visualizations.