What can music teach us about architecture?
When it comes to the storied history of modernist design in Southern California, Gabriel Kahane can give a musical lesson or two in this historic building genre. Released last year, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter’s latest album “The Ambassador” features ten tracks about ten street addresses in his birthplace of Los Angeles. Working with producers Matt Johnson (St. Vincent), Casey Foubert (Sufjan Stevens), and Rob Moose (Bon Iver), Kahane effortlessly weaves through these structures’ stories and details their individual contributions to the overall identity of the city.
The album resonates with a calming, poetic feel that subtly transports listeners to the time and place where each address is evaluated. Listeners can follow in Kahane’s footsteps via the Ambassador Atlas, hearing commentary on why he chose to showcase the homes of R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright while also dipping into the flashy histories of Griffith Observatory, Union Station, and of course, the Ambassador Hotel.
Kahane is currently on tour in support of the album, but he was happy to spend a moment catching up with Architizer to discuss the idea of using music as a lens through which to view architecture.
Architizer: Let’s start with the origin of this project — how did it come about?
Gabriel Kahane: I had the initial impulse in my mid-20s. I was in L.A. doing a theater job and it was the first time I had spent time there and really started to fall in love with the city. I was reading a lot of the proto-Los Angeles literature. In 2012, I was in L.A. for something and I was driving to the airport and decided not to take the freeway, but do surface roads. I was incredibly moved by the city, the working-class neighborhoods, and the quality of light at that hour. The city kind of vibrated and resonated with me. That very personal emotional impulse started me on the project. I thought, “Why am I feeling this way?” That led me down this incredible path of all this research.
Architecture and music are two drastically different things. How do you reconcile their differences with the message you are trying to communicate?
I don’t perceive them as being at such a great distance from one another. Yes, there is a functional aspect to architecture that music doesn’t have. And music can be said to be purely aesthetic, lacking the practical application of architecture, but beyond those basic distinctions, there is so much in common between the two.
Primarily, [the album] is about how we construct memory around space. It’s about the stories and characters that inhabit these spaces.
In fact, it’s to the point where both musicians and architects frequently speak of the architecture of music. We talk about music having solid architecture. Peter Zumthor talked early on about the relationship between architecture and music and how we think. As a concrete example, an architect has to think about building materials, and often those materials in their naked state are prosaic and pedestrian. It’s the application of these materials in a unique design that creates transcendence, not necessarily the building materials themselves. Music is the same. In music, we have the same 12 tones between one octave and the next — in a sense, very pedestrian. It’s about the application of those materials, the (architectural) forms that we create, the colors we draw from instruments, that offer beauty in music.
A building can be read, in some sense, on a superficial level, its façade. But with the advent of the idea of “space architecture,” as expressed by an architect like Schindler, that all starts to change. Before Schindler, there’s the premise that the building is the “other” relative to nature. With Schindler, the building and nature are seamlessly integrated, and the human being becomes the “other,” navigating and transgressing the space. In that sense, architecture can transcend the sense of being “out of time” and become more like music, a time-based art, in that you have to move through it to experience it. It’s about how you perceive structure over time. Music always exists as a durational event, but architecture can as well.
Kings Road House (a.k.a. Schindler-Chace House). Photo via the Ambassador Atlas
An architect’s job is to change how we experience space on the level of perception. Music, at its core, does the same. At its best, music has a physical impact on the body that precedes cerebration, and there again is a similarity with architecture. Now, the the album is not, specifically speaking, about architecture qua architecture. There are moments where it does address architecture specifically, as in “Union Station (800 N. Alameda St.)” and “Villains (4616 Dundee Dr.),” but for the most part, the primary preoccupation of the album is with the idea of how we construct memory around space. It’s about the stories and characters that inhabit these spaces.
What challenges did you face when writing songs about these buildings and in bringing their histories — vignettes about the city as a whole — to life?
The single biggest challenge was a question of how to locate the album temporally. One of the things you find in reading literature about Los Angeles is that things become dated so quickly because the city is in so much flux. Think of History of Forgetting by Norman Klein. Even 15 years later, it feels somewhat dated. So, I decided to make the album a period piece which cuts off at 1994, but also makes room for speculations about the future, in the form of a number of post-apocalyptic songs. The earliest it dates back is with the opening of the Ambassador Hotel and the last concrete thing is the L.A. Riots in 1992.
I think L.A. is such a hard place to read because it’s so vast. Unlike New York, which can be read largely as a collection of public spaces — say, getting off the train of Grand Central Station, which immediately gives you a flavor of the city — Los Angeles has, for most of its history, been a collection of private spaces, though that has begun to change over the last decade or two. For a long time, you only understood the spirit of the city by being in private homes or by driving. But I think under Mayor Eric Garcetti, we’ve seen a real shift toward viable public transportation, a more bike-able city, as well as the Great Streets initiative, where the city is subsidizing business owners who will open and operate along predetermined stretches of various thoroughfares with the intention of turning them into walkable neighborhoods. It’s a very exciting time for Los Angeles.
I want to be clear that I’m a big fan of the city. The melancholy that’s expressed in the record is not intended to throw shade at the city, but rather serves as an attempt to capture a moment. And for me, that moment is sort of encapsulated in the preservation battle over the Ambassador Hotel, which was shuttered in 1989, and finally razed in the mid-00s. Though the L.A. Conservancy was unsuccessful in its bid to save the hotel, I think that the publicity surrounding the campaign was instrumental in creating L.A.’s sense of its own architectural history, and more broadly, its cultural lineage.
The Ambassador Hotel. Photo via the Ambassador Atlas
Do you think your work can be seen as a way of preserving these buildings?
I would like to think so. It is about memory and loss and so I think it’s also my desire for people to hear the album and experience L.A. differently. If they are in L.A., they can experience place differently and think more deeply about the physical spaces they inhabit. In doing so, that’s an act of preservation.
For a complete list of songs from “The Ambassador” and tour dates, visit Kahane’s website.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated for clarity and consistency.