Art in the margins: could time in the sidelines put your heart and art back in the game? - practice

Residential Architect, June, 2003 by Cheryl Weber

Author, sculptor, painter, illustrator: Whether pursued as hobbies or as income, the various art forms architects practice are a way to make a personal statement and to bring their professional lives full circle. In addition to taking Fridays off for landscape painting, Eck has just finished writing a book with Taunton Press called The Distinctive Home: A Vision of Timeless Design. He hopes its sales will be a source of income for the firm, and a means of marketing. "I spent two-and-a-half years writing the book," he says, and then changes his mind--"20 years, actually."

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new York City architect Alexander Gorlin, AIA, has designed furniture and lighting fixtures, but had never attempted something as technical as a musical instrument. Until last year, that is, when he entered the First International Piano Design Competition, sponsored by Maximiliaan's House of Grand Pianos--and won. The idea of entering the competition came to him on a trip to the Milan Furniture Fair, where he saw some antique pianos and started sketching them. "The oldest one was from the 1700s and looked very modern, minimal, and sleek," Gorlin says. "When this competition was announced I had an idea to apply some of the principles of modern architecture to piano design, to create floating planes and open up the previously solid object to spatial integration."

For Gorlin, the grand piano was a fun object to play with. As an icon, it has always been viewed as something that couldn't be improved, he says. "Le Corbusier thought the curve was related to the nature of music, but the casing was always open to interpretation."

The architect took the theme of black and white keys and added primary colors--red, yellow, and blue--to demarcate the three axes of Cartesian space. "The poet Goethe said architecture is frozen music," he says. "I inverted that to reflect the idea that the piano is architecture in space." So far, a single piano has been made. Manufactured in Germany, constructed with a traditional grand-piano cast-iron plate and encased in molded birch and spruce with a lacquer finish, it sports a $150,000 price tag. What home furnishing object might be next for the architect? "After a piano," Gorlin says, "what piece of furniture can't you design?"--c.w.

Cheryl Weber is a contributing writer in Severna Park, Md.