Luthier’s Live, work Place | Farrokh Rostami Kia

Architecture is a dance of forms performed to the melody of story. There are many parameters which directly affect form, but an eternal form is one which has a purpose.
Two brothers, both luthiers, were inseparable as children and young adults, but when one moved to New York the other was left alone and his desire to work and make music was silenced. The recent return of his long-absent brother, however, has reinvigorated his desire for their shared craft and now the two have decided to begin again in Albuquerque, in a new building in which they can both work and live.
The boy, my client, wants to forget his past and to find a window to look through to see a brighter future. Forgetting one’s past leads to repeating the same mistakes, yet the darkness of my client’s recent past was something that needed to be subdued. I started with a solid cube to represent his previous miserable life, then cut it both vertically and horizontally to let the light and air in, a way of cleansing the decay of his past.
A wise man said a man’s life is a mirror of his career. I like this definition of life. Its unbelievable how we deform and reform ourselves to fulfill the demands of our careers. Consequently, I want him to have a nice influenced life by his career, that’s what architects can do. Having created a pathway, the next step was to let the place facilitate the full expression of this new life. He is a luthier; the form of the building should be such that his career and life are in harmony.