Circle House, Three Lakes, Wisconsin, by Poon Design
I am a storyteller. Whether music, painting, writing, or architecture, the creative act is one of communication—the sharing of ideas. And not necessarily mine.
As an architect, I want to know your story, ambitions and dreams, successes, and yes, even your battle scars. I call all of this content. Architecture gives this content a physical expression, capturing a narrative in sticks and stones, steel and glass.
Circle House, Three Lakes, Wisconsin, by Poon Design
If I am designing your residence, the approach is more than just the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. I want to know the story of your family. How many kids? How many pets? Does the mother-in-law live with you? How are the holidays celebrated? Do certain family members sleep with the windows open?
Lincoln Studios, Santa Monica, California, by Poon Design (photo by Gregg Segal)
If designing a corporate headquarters, the agenda is not just about usable square footage and meeting rooms. Instead, what is your mission statement? What are the business objectives? In-person, remote, or hybrid? What is the corporate culture? Private offices vs. Zoom rooms and hoteling areas?
Herget Middle School, West Aurora, Illinois, by Anthony Poon w/ A4E (photo by Mark Ballogg)
If a school, let’s talk less about the number of classrooms and storage areas, and more about the educational methodology? How to teachers teach? How to students learn? How do they have lunch then play?
Joss Cuisine, Beverly Hills, California, by Poon Design (photo by Poon Design)
If a restaurant, go beyond the number of stools at the bar and seats in the dining room. Rather, what is the food concept? What is the service model? Who are the diners? Table cloths or not?
Kinrgy by Julianne Hough, West Hollywood, California, by Poon Design (rendering by Encore)
Architecture as storytelling is the manifestation of our ideas and themes—broad and specific, explicit and implicit, abstract and tactile. And all this should drive the design decisions from the Big Picture (e.g., shape of a building and overall character) to the details (e.g., cabinet wood species and bathroom tile patterns).
Café Dulce, Vernon, California, by Poon Design (photo by Poon Design)
When learning a Mozart piano sonata, what is Mozart trying to say to us? What is his story? Is it just notes and chords, or is there a story behind the music? Maybe a love story, funeral march, or a dance festival? Consider also, Beethoven’s 1798 Rondo a Capriccio, also known as Rage Over a Lost Penny. Beethoven believed his maid stole a penny. Fueled by his frustration, Beethoven wrote this piano Rondo. And the notes captured his anger, sharing a story of fury and annoyance.
Me at the piano, Rolling Hills Estates, California (photo by Grant Bozigian)
When I play this work, how should I add my story to Beethoven’s story? Should I play extra loud exploding with irritation, moderately to temper his temper, or humorously to suggest the absurdity of the circumstances with his accused maid?
(photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash)
Whether I am playing music, painting, writing, or designing, there is one overarching theme: the audience. All my works are created for an audience. Music’s audience might be just one person, a small group, or a concert hall audience. A painting might hang at a local art show or in a museum. A writing might an introspective journal entry or a published book soon to be a movie. And in architecture, the audience is many fold, from the client to the daily users, from the cleaning crew to the critics, from an accidental visitor to a design fanatic.
Find an audience. Tell a story.
#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
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)
#107: THE ARCH PODCAST, FORM MAGAZINE, 1 OF 3: STORYTELLING THROUGH ART
October 4, 2019
Skull Painting, 44” x 52”, by Anthony Poon (2018)
Carol Bishop: Hi, this is Carol Bishop with Form: Pioneering Design. Thank you for joining The Arch, connecting and supporting the arts and design community. Today, we are fortunate to have Anthony Poon of Poon Design Inc. Poon Design is a multi-disciplinary studio in architecture, interiors, and place making. In addition, Anthony is a noted artist, musician, and author. To begin, I’d like to welcome you, Anthony, and ask you to give us an introduction.
Recording session for The Arch Podcast with Carol Bishop (photo by The Arch)
Anthony Poon: Thank you and good morning, Carol. I’m excited to be here. My professional focus is Poon Design Inc. We are an architecture company in Los Angeles, and we focus on a diversity of projects from residential to commercial, from mixed-use to sacred projects, educational projects as well as hospitality, restaurants and retail. I would say that’s my job. It’s what I do when I go to work. But my passion is actually any form of creative expression, whether it is architecture, music, writing, or painting.
The annual tuning of my 1957 Lindeman spinet piano (photo by Anthony Poon)
Carol: Well, let’s take that a little bit further because I’d like to know what led you to become an architect, musician, artist, writer, and how you balance these and what the connections are between them.
Anthony: It’s all about creative expression. It’s about communication. It’s about having ideas about the world, about culture, about society, and finding ways in which I can express that, that I can communicate that to an audience. It could be through the design of a library, it could be through the design of a park, it could be through performing music or composing. It could be through writing an essay, or painting a painting, or making a sculpture. In all forms of these artistic expressions, they’re all communicating something that I want to say.
Carol: Let’s take that as a starting point. Often, when you’re doing music or art, it’s a solitary experience. You’re honing your skills, you’re problem-solving what media to use. How do you marry idea and communication with that part of the structures of working in the arts?
Anthony: I would disagree that it is a solitary exercise. In every form of artistic experimentation, there is an audience. If I’m designing a building, if it’s a house, the audience or the client, is a family. If I’m designing a performing arts center, theater, or a concert hall, the audience would be the people that come to visit—to hear an event. If I am playing a piece of music, it could be for an audience of one, it could be for some friends or family, or it could be for hundreds of people at a recital. When I paint, when I do some mixed-media explorations, I’m thinking that this is not a piece just for me, that this is a piece to share with the world that could end up in someone’s living room. Even though I may be at my piano by myself, or at my studio with a canvas by myself, or with my sketchbook sitting at the gas station, the circumstances may be that I am in a solo mode, but the goal is to share something with a larger audience.
(photo by Vishnu R Nair on Pexels)
Carol: When you say that your designs have ideas, are you talking about stories or narratives? How do you integrate that into your work?
Anthony: Design is storytelling. What we do when we start a project is to learn as much as we can about the client, whether the client is a family or a corporation. It could be a restaurant or a hotel. We want to hear their stories. We want to hear their ambitions, their agendas, their success stories as well as maybe some battle scars. We want to know what they dream of and what they envision for their future.
If it’s a house, someone might tell us about some Thanksgiving dinner they envision throwing in a wonderful dining room—or a child sitting at a bay window reading a book and the way the sun comes through the leaves on the nearby tree. If it’s a restaurant, the client might tell us a story about the cuisine, how they approach getting their ingredients and how they prepare their meals. If it’s a school, there’s definitely an educational manifesto, what the curriculum is and what the methodology is for teaching.
We listen to all of this, and it becomes the story. It becomes what we call content. It is such pieces of information, facts, and stories that become the basis for how we design a building.
Live Learn Eat: Architecture by Anthony Poon, a soon-to-be-published book by ORO Publishers, edited by Michael Webb, available early 2020
Carol: I know your second book (first one here ) is coming out called, Live Learn Eat: Architecture by Anthony Poon, and so I’m very interested in it. Can you tell me something about it?
Anthony: This book is coming out hopefully the end of the year. It’s being published by ORO Publishers, a very prestigious international publishing group. This book is spearheaded by Michael Webb, the well-known architectural writer and critic. We’re honored that he has decided to lead this project. Michael came up with this incredible theme for us, Live, Learn, Eat—to suggest that this book covers three different categories of our work. “Live” obviously means our residential work, and that’s both custom design as well as tract housing. “Learn” is our educational work, our schools. “Eat” would be our bars and restaurants. As far as we know, we don’t think a book like this exists. There are plenty of books on architects designing homes. That’s the majority of books you’ll find at Barnes & Noble. There are many architects who specialize in restaurants, and there are the K-12 / higher education big firms that specialize in such.
Our monograph is a unique triple-threat book that shows how we operate at all scales and for many different kinds of clients. It makes me think with our increasing body of work and interest in many different project types, this theme can become an ongoing series of books about us over the years. We can do a book called something like, Play Work Pray, for example. “Play” could be our recreational projects. “Work” is our office buildings, and “Pray” would be our religious projects. And so on.
Linea Residence V, by Poon Design, Palm Springs (photo by David Blank)
Carol: In the end, do you have a manifesto?
Anthony: I don’t have a manifesto. I think there are daily goals and there are things that I want to achieve. But I think back to one of my employers, the late Hugh Hardy. He had always said that mission statements and manifestos are dangerous things, because once you put it out there, people will accuse you of not supporting your own mission statement or accuse you of being in contradiction to what you’ve set out to do.
A manifesto is quite ambitious. I could also be accused of being naïve to think that I could write a manifesto, whether it’s a paragraph or 100 pages. I think I prefer the jazz-like approach in which I get up each morning and wonder what the day will bring, and approach it more organically—and see how I can just come up with ideas for whatever I’m to confront each and every day of my life.
A manifesto is quite ambitious. I could also be accused of being naïve to think that I could write a manifesto, whether it’s a paragraph or 100 pages. I think I prefer the