IMPROVISATION | anthonypoon.com

#230: THE SECOND STUDIO PODCAST, PART 1 OF 4 | ARCHITECTURE SLOW, JAZZ FAST

September 18, 2026

A decade ago, colleagues David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet of FAME Architecture and Design, launched an ambitious project, The Second Studio. They describe this ever-expanding work—500 episodes and counting—as, “an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. . . it features interviews with renowned professionals, guides to architecture, and thoughtful takes on all things design. The show is honest, humorous, and irreverent.” I was excited to be part of episode #517, presented here in four parts—edited for length and clarity.

David Lee: Here we go.

Anthony Poon: I was born in San Francisco Chinatown. And I think there was something about the density of that community that struck me—this kind of urbanism, physical closeness, buildings that span historic to contemporary. During high school, my family moved to Burlingame, one of the largest enclaves of Eichler homes. I was surrounded by these wonderful Mid-Century Modern masterpieces. Another interesting piece of my architectural background was my school, Mills High School. It was one of the first prefab schools. It was said that the school was on the cover of Time magazine with the statement that you could take apart the entire high school with a single screwdriver.

Homes by developer/builder Joseph Eichler, Burlingame, California (photos by Anthony Poon)

Marina Bourderonnet: What kind of screwdriver are we talking about here?

Anthony: A very big one. The structure was all prefab steel frame with prefab insulated wall panels.

David: No kidding!

Anthony: The school was a kit-o-parts, a neat backdrop that might have had something to do with me becoming an architect.

David: Did you go straight from high school to study architecture? Was this background enough to inform your decision with what you were going to do? Or did you have an uncle who was an architect?

Anthony: Well, the great response to that question is yes. I do have an uncle who is an architect, a distant relative by the name of I.M. Pei.

Marina: Wait, what?!

I.M. Pei, Louvre Museum, Paris, France, 1989 (photo by Piero Oliosi, Polaris/Newscom)

Anthony: He is related through a couple leaps, but yeah, a relative. I’ve only met him once. But back to your original part of the question. No, I didn’t jump into architecture. My passion was actually music. And you may know that having been to my studio and seeing the piano. I often write and talk about music, as well as the relationship of music to architecture. Music was my passion, but my Asian parents wanted me to pursue a profession, something that would provide security. Being a musician didn’t quite fit.

Architecture just fell in later. I liked drawing and painting. I liked making things. I took architecture classes at UC Berkeley, but continued my music education. Even much later when I considered grad schools, it was music versus architecture. But I think the decision was clear—that I could be an architect, run an architecture studio, and still play piano on the side, write music, even perform here and there, versus being a concert pianist and trying to run an architecture company on the side.

David: So the perception of the “architect” as a professional provided more stability in your parents’ eyes than being a musician?

Anthony: Isn’t that the irony though? In my parents’ eyes, yes. Architecture provided more stability, more than a musician at least. But as we know, the realities of that kind of security for an architect is much less than a number of other industries like law, dentistry, doctor, finance.

College of Environmental Design, Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley, California (photo by Hector Abarca)

David: So when you went to Berkeley, was it firstly for music performance?

Anthony: It was for music composition, history, theory, and performance. I took music classes alongside my architecture major.

David: Was your time split like fifty-fifty between music and architecture?

Anthony: Yeah, I would go from the architecture studio to the music building. I would go into one of the music practice rooms and work on my music for hours, then back to the architecture building. It was an exciting back and forth: two different crowds. And that passion for both music and architecture continued even after I graduated college, as I mentioned, all the way up to deciding where I should apply for grad school. I specifically remember one night looking at both the application for Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and Julliard, trying to figure out where to go. And I picked, again with my parents’ voices in my head, Harvard. But even when there, my studies were still music-related. For example, my graduate thesis looked at how jazz music is made to see if I could apply those ideas to how architecture is made.

Anthony’s graduate school thesis, 1991-1992, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

David: We have some parallels, because when I was in college studying architecture, I was also doing a lot of music. Your narrative about being in architecture studio, then going to the music practice room at night, and then back to architecture studio is one that I also lived through. It was enjoyable, but also really weird, because to your point, they’re completely different groups of people. It was strange to have each foot in two different universes. But that relationship between music and architecture—let’s talk about that.

Anthony: You probably know the famous quote from Goethe, that “architecture is frozen music.” There are all these overlaps of conceptual themes like harmony, rhythm, structure, and counterpoint. These things explain both music and architecture. But my interest was about the process. It wasn’t about designing buildings based on music. My interest was how music is made, and how architecture is made. And that’s where my interest in jazz comes into play.

Architecture is typically slow, tedious. There’s a lot of moving parts—technical aspects countered by creative aspects. There are budgets and schedules and details. A building can take forever to complete. But jazz music is spontaneous. It’s organic and impromptu. Can architecture be a little looser in its creative process?

David: So what shape did your thesis take? Programmatically, what was it?

Anthony: It started as a large written document, a dissertation, studying all these ideas, looking at jazz musicians, reading jazz philosophy, applying it all to architectural theory. It led to the work of Carlos Scarpa, who I found to be a kind of architect that applied a jazz-like process. My final project was the transformation of San Francisco’s Fort Mason into a cultural center. The thesis is a bit abstract, a bit lengthy, but that’s sort of the gist of it.

Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy, by Carlo Scarpa (photo by Rui Alves, Unsplash)

David: Sometimes I feel what we do is quite serious, right? There’s professional liability. If we’re doing public structures, we have to think about the public’s safety. This causes the process to become more rigid and more restrained.

Anthony: I think it is just our training. In grad school, the word “rigor” was used throughout all our classes. It’s a great word. Architecture is a discipline. We have responsibility to the visitors of our buildings. But can’t we loosen up that creative process while still keeping an overall umbrella of rigor?

I worked in large corporate firms in the past. When they got a new project, architects right away grabbed their scales and started figuring out square footages, analyzing the technical aspects of the site and the budget, how it breaks down per square feet, per material, per division. The project was already locked into these kind of formulaic rules. There’s nothing too wrong with this in general, but there must be some other kind of approach, some other layer we can apply to make things, again, improvisational like jazz.

Marina: So do you ignore all of these logistical constraints and start from a freer approach—to understand what the project wants to be before diving into technicalities?

Anthony: There’s no way of ignoring the technicalities, because we know they are part of every project. No matter how we start, those things will come back to influence what we do, or maybe even haunt what we do. But I think the beginning can start sort of anywhere. It could be a group brainstorming where everyone just tosses out ideas and draws together. Maybe someone’s inspired by poetry or a piece of music. Everything in the very beginning has value to the creative process. And it doesn’t have to start with someone running calculations. Inspiration comes from everywhere. We should constantly be aware of this, so that we can grab at inspiration when it hits us.

I think of a jazz concert I went to in Culver City many years ago at the Jazz Bakery. The musicians asked the audience to yell out numbers from one to seven, which represented the keys of a piano within the eight note octave. People did, and there resulted a sequence of random numbers. Then the pianist plucked out on the keyboard these random half dozen numbers, and kept repeating it. Soon the other musicians jumped in, a chord structure was added. Then rhythm. Then more and more. This piece of music was a full-blown original piece of improvisational jazz genius.

Marina: That’s pretty cool. So you can ask clients at the first meeting to just throw out a bunch of numbers?

David: It’s kind of similar. The information we get from clients is not as random as an audience member throwing out numbers, but we are hit with a bunch of information that we have to synthesize to create something hopefully poetic. But it is really easy to get trapped. I’ve been in offices and seen exactly what you’re describing. There’s people with their calculators and their scales, or their Revit files and they just click, click, click on the mouse. Then suddenly it’s like, “Oh, I guess we’re done with this phase of work.”

Anthony: Yeah, exactly.

(Part 2 of 4 coming soon.)

#192: “DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE”

August 30, 2024

Colby Residence, Los Angeles, California, by Poon Design (photo by Hunter Kerhart)

On July 25, 2024, I was interviewed for Josh Cooperman’s podcast, Convo by Design. About his forum, Josh explains, “A podcast dedicated to promoting the ideas of architects, artists, designers, tastemakers and those making a difference in the way we live. Design is personal as is a good conversation.”

At the Los Angeles showroom of Design Hardware, Josh introduced a thesis, “Architecture is an art form that also serves a primary function, that of shelter, workspace, centers for learning, social spaces and gathering places. This is a form of art with a language all its own.

“Long debated is which comes first: form or function? But that’s not quite the right question to be asking these days. A better question might be, for whom does architecture serve, and how can the space serve individual needs, both now and into the future.

Circle House, Three Lakes, Wisconsin, by Poon Design

“American society has learned to move to a new shelter space in the same way that a hermit crab moves to a new and bigger shell. We’re not hermit crabs, and this model has only served to increase costs and decrease availability of housing. Let’s think differently about how architecture can achieve different results.”

My edited responses to a few of Josh’s questions:

“Hi, my name is Anthony Poon. My architecture and design company is Poon Design Inc. We are awarding-winning architects and designers. We design houses. We design schools, religious projects, commercial, restaurants, bars, hospitality, university projects. We do it all.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Photo by Cansu on Pexels)

“My personal take on design is driven by my background as a musician. I love jazz, and I am a classically-trained pianist. I like bringing musical ideas and philosophies into our work. I like looking at how discipline and improvisation can come together and drive the architectural process.

“There’s the famous Goethe quote, that you probably know. ‘Architecture is frozen music.’

“Or some has said, ‘Music is melting architecture.’

“It’s fascinating to talk about both. Thelonious Monk also said, ‘talking about music is like dancing about architecture.’

I think the overlaps are very clear, with things like rhythm, ornamentation, measure, beat. For example, the beat in music is like gravity in architecture.

“My fascination with jazz is about how jazz is made—improvisationally, impromptu, spontaneous—and whether such ideas can influence the way architecture is made. Architecture is a slower, sometimes tedious process compared to jazz. Architects deal with engineering. We deal with city codes, budgets, client, etc. It can take years, sometimes decades to complete a project.

“What can we learn from jazz? How can we learn from that kind of music—to look at our creative process to find inspiration from one field of study to another?

“In fact, I am the type of artist that doesn’t separate the different fields of studies. I think of it all as one creative force, one endeavor under one artistic umbrella. I like music. I like painting. I like writing. I like architecture. And I don’t separate the four. It is one force moving together at the same time.”

#155: WHETHER IT’S MUSIC, PAINTING, OR WRITING, ARCHITECT ANTHONY POON HAS A STORY TO TELL

July 15, 2022

“The interdisciplinary architect discusses his first novel, the relationship between architecture and music, and designing for everyone. Anthony Poon has a story to tell. Actually, he has many stories to tell—some in written form, others in the language of architecture, music, or painting.” So writes journalist Brian Libby for a recent article in Metropolis. Below are edited and abridged excerpts.

Death by Design at Alcatraz, by Anthony Poon, published by Goff Books, 2022

Brian Libby: Poon Design Inc. has completed over 300 projects, as chronicled in the 2020 book Live Learn Eat: Architecture by Anthony Poon. Earlier this year he was named to the American Institute of Architects’ College of Fellows, following national awards for educational, residential and restaurant designs. He’s also a certified Feng Shui practitioner, and recently released his debut mystery novel Death by Design at Alcatraz. Yet books are just one of Poon’s passions. He’s also a mixed-media artist and with a master’s degree in architecture. Poon trained even longer—from the age of six—to be a concert pianist. In 1987, after earning a magna cum laude in architecture and music from the University of California Berkeley, he had to decide between applying to The Julliard School and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, ultimately choosing the latter.”

Live Learn Eat: Architecture by Anthony Poon, edited by Michael Webb, published by ORO Editions, 2020

The question of rigid composition versus improvising relates to being a pianist. Could you talk about that?

Anthony Poon: Growing up, my training was classical music. It’s this process of aiming for perfection, a flawless performance. Playing a piano sonata—there are a hundred thousand notes, and you’ve got to hit them all correctly. If I got one note off, my piano teacher would say, “That whole performance is ruined.” But I got interested in something beyond technical proficiency. You’ve got to be able to add a voice, a story. I eventually learned about jazz. It blew my mind that these pianists would just sit at the keyboard and make things up.

Anthony Poon at Ranchos Palos Verdes, California (photo by Olive Stays)

Brian: Your thesis at Harvard was about how jazz improvisation informs the architecture process. What did you learn?

Anthony: Architecture is very methodical. It takes a long time to produce a building. There are a lot of practical considerations: code, budget, square footage. You can’t just whip out a building the way a jazz musician would whip out music. But in the creative process, I always wonder: Why can’t we just grab colors and make an idea? Why can’t we have this sort of jazz-like conversation bouncing ideas and simply grab at this and that, and make it the basis of an entire building design, whether it’s a library, museum, or house?

Greenman Elementary School, Aurora, Illinois, by Anthony Poon, A4E, and Cordogan, Clark & Associates (photo by Mark Ballogg)

Brian: Let’s go back to this question of architecture and narrative. Could you talk about the importance of storytelling in design?

Anthony: It’s all about communication. Everything that I do––painting, music, writing, architecture––is all a language. In architecture, we look to our clients—who they are and what they are—to craft a story. If it’s a family, we want to know how they celebrate the holidays, if the in-laws stay with them, whether they have dogs. For designing a school, we ask: How do the teachers teach, how do the students learn? With an office: what’s the corporate culture, what’s the mission statement? When we do a religious project, there is an entire set of beliefs that need to be expressed in architecture. What’s exciting about music and architecture, and what makes them different from writing, is that they are abstract. It’s kind of open-ended communication.

Sticks and Stones | Steel and Glass: One Architect’s Journey, published by Unbridled Books, 2017

Brian: In your memoir, Sticks & Stones | Steel & Glass: One Architect’s Journey, you write about designing intimate spaces for people.

Anthony: What we talk about at my firm is that good design belongs to everyone. It could be a restaurant or the design of a bench—corporate headquarters or a public school. It’s about harnessing the talents that my team brings, and then reaching as many people as possible.

Brian: Where do you stand on the introvert-extrovert scale? Because architecture, especially when you get to a certain scale, is teamwork. Painting, which you’re also acclaimed for, is a more solitary activity.

Anthony: I’m probably somewhere in the middle but skewing a little towards the extrovert side. Some of these art forms are solo explorations, but I don’t see the art being complete until it reaches the audience. That’s the completion of the artistic arc. With any kind of artist, both introversion and extroversion are tapped. In architecture, for example, the introverted, introspective, self-examining qualities usually launch the design process, and the extroverted side leads a team, sells the idea to a client, and supports the creative ego.

top: Alleyway, 30” x 42”, 2019; bottom left: Melrose Brown, 23” x 27”, 2021; bottom right: Feeling Orange, 20” x 24”, 2019

Brian: In Sticks & Stones | Steel & Glass, you described how San Francisco’s Portsmouth Square in Chinatown inspired you. The park dates to 1833, but its 1963 redesign was derided at the time for raising the park to fit a parking garage underneath. What made it special to you and the community?

Anthony: Isn’t it incredible that it is a parking structure and an extraordinary park? The plaza acts like a blank canvas, and the community paints their life onto this canvas. It’s just that kind of wonderful, idyllic place that you don’t imagine would be in such a dense area. I look at Portsmouth Square, not as an architect fetishizing its design, but as what it offers to the community: to have a Tai Chi class at 5:00 in the morning, a wedding at noon, and kids running around in all day. That’s the power of architecture.

Portsmouth Square, Chinatown, San Francisco, California (photo by Bert Brautigam)

#30: JAZZ-LIKE: THE CURIOUS THING ABOUT STYLE, PART 2 OF 2

March 3, 2016

Kit-O-Parts concept model for Chaya Downtown, Los Angeles, by Poon Design

What can architecture learn from jazz? Specifically, what can architects designing buildings learn from musicians creating jazz?

I recently posted my design approach as two parts: Product and Process. In that post, I discussed the ‘Product’ being works of juxtaposition. In today’s post, I explore my ‘Process’ being jazz-like.

Conference room pin-up wall for a chapel for an Air Force retirement community, San Antonio, Texas, by Poon Design

Many things bog an architect down, such as calculations that ensure a structure won’t collapse. Budgets, city codes, and construction surprises also burden us. The nature of our day to day design work is slow and tedious. From start to finish, a completed building requires years or decades. Even generations. Whether Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica or a local wine store, the architectural process is sluggish and overwrought. At times, painfully so.

With graphic design, on the other hand, a logo can be designed and implemented efficiently. In less than a month, boom, the logo appears on a website. (Sorry, my graphic artists’ friends, I know it is much more complicated than this, but in comparison . . .)

Process for “Sexy Conversation,” 40” x 40”, mixed media, by Anthony Poon

In jazz, musicians sit at their instruments, glance at each other, perhaps a wink, then a smile. And boom: music. A jam session begins, and the audience immediately enjoys the sounds and rhythms.

Spontaneity and improvisation are words that describe jazz. In contrast, as a classically-trained pianist, I was taught a mindset akin to architecture, where at great lengths and with agony, each and every move is carefully conditioned and rigorously rational.

When performing Liszt, I wouldn’t just discard the sheet music and riff on an Etude. Or maybe I would, but then it becomes something other than Liszt—and that might not be good. With architecture, I wouldn’t just discard the structural calculations for a hillside foundation and doodle my own geotechnical assumptions. A well-built castle isn’t constructed on sand.

Study models for a chapel for an Air Force retirement community, San Antonio, Texas, by Poon Design

Is there room for speed in architecture? How about intuition? Social psychologist David Sudnow comments on jazz as moving “. . . from no one place in particular to no one place in particular . . .” I wish architecture had this kind of freedom.

Though I can’t actually be like a jazz pianist playing impromptu, I still try. Every day, I attempt to hand draw ideas freely without the constraints of either a T-square or the laptop. Rather than picking the appropriate shade of olive from the Pantone color book, I use my color markers and pencils. Swiftly and even blindly, I grab at colors, blending in a mad flurry seeking hues of discovery and spontaneity.

Jazz and juxtaposition—two words I might use to describe my work. Very likely, I will replace these two words with different words the next time an interviewer asks me, “What is your style?” In the end, I leave the labeling of the work to the historians, intellectuals, critics, and fans. When I am long gone, I hope my design legacy is given a provocative designation of style.

(For more, see a feature on my process at The Art Issue of LA Home magazine.)

Anthony Poon’s sketches, studies and notes

#25: THE CURIOUS THING ABOUT STYLE, PART 1 OF 2

December 31, 2015

For this food blogger’s residence in Pasadena, we juxtaposed the technology of parametric algorithms on to polyethylene, the material used to make household cutting boards.

Recently, I was asked by an interviewer, “What is your style?”

This question is often asked, and not just of architects, but creatives of all sorts: fashion, graphics, advertising, cuisine, etc. The media typically aims to capture one’s design philosophy in a sound bite digestible by mainstream readers.

Many interior decorators have a packaged response. I hear words like “eclectic,” “warm and welcoming,” “contemporary yet timeless.” I am not sure what kind of design results from this mash up of clichés.

Architects have a hard time speaking of their style. Hugh Hardy, one of my past employers, argued that once you answer the dreaded question, your critics will constantly be assessing your work to see if you have lived up to your declarations.

What is style after all?

With extensive education, a higher degree and a 250-page graduate school thesis, many architects simply can’t and won’t summarize their creative philosophy in 20 words or less. For some, “style” is a bad word, and it shouldn’t be an elevator pitch.

upper left: Federal National Council’s Parliament Building, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emiretes by Ehrlich Architects; upper right: McNamara Alumni Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, by Antoine Predock Architect Studio (photo by Bobak Ha’Eri); lower left: Dominus Estate, Yountville, California, by Herzog & de Meuron (photo by Anthony Poon); lower right: The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington D.C., by Steven Holl Architects (photo by Lewis J Goetz on Unsplash)

Some colleagues who talk about their architectural style do so with clever labels. Steven Ehrlich, based in Los Angeles, calls his work “Regional Modernism.” New Mexico architect Antoine Predock is a self-described “Cosmic Modernist.” Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland has been coined, “Elemental Reductivists.” From New York, Steven Holl’s work involves “typology, phenomenology and existentialism.”

For architects such as Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando or Richard Meier, their style has been accused of being formulaic. Many would argue that all their buildings look the same. Is this so bad? Don’t all the Beatles’ songs and Beethoven Sonatas sound similar? (This topic of formula will be discussed in an upcoming blog.)

So now it is my turn to answer the universal question of style. My response should not be trite, but rather complex—but not pretentious.

Louis Armstrong (by WikiImages from Pixabay)

I answered in two parts: Process and Product. My Process is inspired by jazz—the spontaneity and the improvisational spirit. (More another day.)

My Product, meaning the final structure, say a house or school, is driven by juxtaposition. I enjoy combining things together, either comfortably or awkwardly, to see what might arise: the modern and the traditional, the hand crafted and the machine made, the broad strokes and the finicky details, just to name a few.

Meditation Retreat House, Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia, by Poon Design

For a Buddhist meditation retreat in Virginia, Poon Design created a guardrail that juxtaposed a galvanized off-the-shelf steel frame with natural twine made from hemp. Yes, you can smoke it.

Student Center, University of California, Riverside, by Anthony Poon while w/ HHPA (rendering by Gilbert Gorski) — Student Center, University of California, Riverside, by Anthony Poon (w/ HHPA, watercolor by Gilbert Gorski)

For the University of California, our student center combined traditional campus brick and limestone, with sleek glass curtain wall and over-scaled weathering zinc shingles.

At Mendocino Farms, we blended a funky old school vibe, such as chalk board walls, vaudeville signage, clothespins, and industrial piping, with high-end luxury, such as Carrara marble, walnut planks, stainless steel trim, and custom furniture.

Mendocino Farms, Los Angeles, California, by Poon Design

Juxtaposition is not just my artistic approach, but the interests in my life as well. I like Brahms and I also like American Idol. I like Rembrandt and Pop Art. I like omakase sushi with a Coke, as well as McDonald’s with sake. I wear Gucci with the Gap. Love Nan Goldin and commercial photography. I read biographies, but also comic books. I like watching ping pong and the Superbowl. Reality shows that follow CNN.

I like the diversity and the messiness. I like unexpected results.

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