Remote Control 1523

Santa Monica, CA, United States

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Remote Control 1523

Santa Monica, CA, United States

Firm

nonzero\architecture

Type

Commercial › Office

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2015

SIZE

5000 sqft - 10,000 sqft

BUDGET

Undisclosed

Photos

Juergen Nogai (14), PHOTOGRAPHY Juergen Nogai (5)

The building is part of a twelve-year ongoing master planning effort for a cluster of buildings in a light industrial area, owned and used by a high profile Hollywood movie composer. The design is part of a continuing endeavor to develop a cohesive campus and to create a sustainable and environmentally sensitive neighborhood, while reinforcing the strong social and artistic networking aspects within the growing group of users.

The new 1523 building is a 2-story, 7,400 square foot structure on a flat lot at the edge of the owner’s campus of several eclectic buildings containing more media production facilities.

The building program includes two state-of-the-art music composition and recording suites plus sixteen small audio production studios with lounge and auxiliary areas. A very dense studio layout required careful acoustic planning.

The project attempts to create a unified identity for the company and its artists, while preserving the varying scales and characters of the different buildings, typical for the eclectic neighborhood. Materials reflect the industrial heritage of the area but their detailing and applications hint at the building’s contemporary use.

A strategy of offering a variety of naturally lit and exterior spaces was pursued to provide relief from the intense process of commercial music creation in the mostly windowless and hermetically sealed studios.

Aluminum screens for shading, guardrails and privacy, some of them moveable, are perforated with a pattern derived from vintage synthesizer modules, a tool used by many of the resident composers, and alludes to a previous building which features a fritted glass handwritten Mozart score, both enlarged to abstraction.