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#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.)

#179: MY TOP TEN FAVE ARCHITECTS

December 1, 2023

The Nancy and Rick Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, by Steven Holl. The architect’s inspiration came from the changing shapes of clouds and the trapezoidal shape of the property. (photo by Richard Barnes)

“Hey Anthony, who is your favorite architect?,” I am often asked.

I might reply, “Can there only be one fave? What is your favorite book or your favorite song?”

upper left: La Pedrera, Barcelona, Spain, by Antoni Gaudi (photo by Erwin Litschauer from Pixabay); upper right: La Muralla Roja in foreground, Xanadu in background, Calp, Spain, by Ricardo Bofill (photo by Lena Polishko on Unsplash); lower left: National Parliament, Bangladesh, by Louis Kahn (photo by Pexels from Pixabay); lower right: Colline Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France, by Le Corbusier (photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash)

For nearly all, there is no one favorite piece of music. For me, there is no one favorite architect. There are several dozen. But here I try, gathering a mere list of ten, in no particular order. Just a note: My list comprises living architects, so excludes favorites like Antoni Gaudi, Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, and Ricardo Bofill.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, by Steven Holl. Adjacent to the renovated museum, five enigmatic glass structures deliver various qualities of natural light into the interconnected subterranean galleries. (photo by Andy Ryan)

1: Steven Holl
Holl possesses an individualistic vision of architecture, where his signature watercolors establishes the conceptual agenda for each project. This New York–based architect blends complex building programs—both new structures as well as additions—with seemingly random sculptural shapes, while applying his mastery of shaping natural light. Time magazine called him “America’s Best Architect” for “buildings that satisfy the spirit as well as the eye.”

Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Switzerland, by Peter Zumthor. Impeccably crafted, the leaf-shaped, one-room structure explores a lemniscate, an algebraic, hyperbolic, inverse curve. (photo by Federico Covre)

2: Peter Zumthor
Often called the “architect’s architect,” there is no one else practicing today so often referred to as a “master” of his craft. Each project from the Swiss architect, the son of a cabinet maker—whether a home, chapel, or museum—is precisely uncompromising, often austere, and elemental, embracing the basics of architecture, e.g., shelter, light, materials. Zumthor suggests, “Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence.”

CCTV, Beijing, China, by Rem Koolhaas. A visionary corporate building instead of the usual and predictable company skyscrapres (photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash)

3: Rem Koolhaas
Dutch architect, provocative theorist, prolific author, professor at Harvard, and one-time filmmaker—Koolhaas brings gravitas and intellectualism to his practice. His work is known for its clarity in conceptual thinking, where a simple idea or diagram drives the development of an entire project, whether a house, library, or entire town. Time magazine put him in their top 100 of “The World’s Most Influential People.”

Quinta do Portal Winery, Celeirós do Douro, Spain, by Alvaro Siza. An elegant composition of a modest material palette and minimal moves. (photo by Rui Alves on Unsplash)

4: Alvaro Siza
Some buildings from this Portugues architect are quiet and minimal, like his Leca Swimming Pools—so integrated into the waterfront that one doesn’t even know where the buildings end and the land begins. Other projects combine invention, and poetry. “Every design,” Siza states, “is a rigorous attempt to capture a concrete moment of a transitory image in all its nuances . . . the more precise they are, the more vulnerable.”

He Art Museum, Shunde, Foshan, Guangdong Province, China, by Tadao Ando. As usual, “less is more.” (photo by Clu Soh on Unsplash)

5: Tadao Ando
Self-taught Japanese architect started out as a truck driver and professional boxer. Contrasting the delirium of such a past, Ando’s portfolio is the epitome of minimalism, exploring a profound nothingness. Nearly all his projects are composed of primarily two materials. 1) poured-in-place concrete—concrete walls, concrete floors, concrete roofs, and 2) natural light (yes, I view light as a construction material). Though many of his buildings appear to be the similar, celebrities flock to own an Ando design: Beyonce and Jay-Z, Kanye West, Tom Ford, Kim Kardashian, amongst others.

Douglas House, Emmet County, Michigan, by Richard Meier. Restored twice since its 1973 completion, this 3,000-square-foot, waterfront residence is one of the most iconic Modernist homes of recent generations—and added to the National Register of Historic Places. (photo by Scott Frances)

6: Richard Meier
New York architect Meier (now retired with controversy) claims, “White conventionally has always been seen as a symbol of perfection, of purity and clarity.” He established his design language, for better or for worse, as the one of the most recognizable styles in history—a singular vision and personal brand of Modernism, stark white surfaces, and strict geometries. The formality and strictness in Meier’s work, though rigid and severe for some, provide an oasis of calm for others.

Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Germany, by Herzog and de Meuron. A new glassy, 2,100-seat concert hall sits upon an 1875-constructed warehouse, rebuilt in 1963. The sweeping roof provides a plaza with views of the docks and city. (photo by Wolfgang Weiser onPixabay)

7: Herzog & de Meuron
Based in Basel, Switzerland, the partnership of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron approaches architecture as a deep dive into design philosophy, experimental methods, and technology. They believe their work “can meet the needs of our rapidly and radically changing world.” Each project is a reinvention of their creative process, with a fetishization of form making, textures, patterns, and materials—both traditional and radical.

Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, Le Brassus, Switzerland, by Bjarke Ingels. This spiraling museum displaying watchmaking history contrasts the company’s traditional 1875 workshop building. (photo by Bjarke Ingels Group)

8: Bjarke Ingels
Many of Ingels’ projects—bold, exaggerated, and cartoonish—appear to have leapt off the pages of a comic book. In fact, he published a 2009 graphic novel entitled, Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution. His firm of 700 architects, simply known as BIG, is one of the fastest rising companies in the global marketplace. The Wall Street Journal called this Copenhagen-based architect, “Innovator of the Year” for architecture and “one of the design world’s rising stars.”

Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, by Thomas Phifer. Mute boxy structures clad in Carderock stone form an introspective campus the combines art, architecture, and landscape. (photo by Anthony Poon)

9: Thomas Phifer
One of the lesser known names on my list, and not yet a Pritzker Laureate like more than half of my list, Phifer established his Manhattan studio after working for Richard Meier. Whether Phifer’s work comprises the self-proclaimed “light buildings that landed lightly on the land” or Thomas De Monchaux’s description of “a river stone, embedded in the flow of its place,” I would suggest that Mies’ “less is more” is the rule. If ever in the D.C. area, do not miss a visit to the Glenstone Museum.

The Biomuseo, Panama, by Frank Gehry. Leaning away from brand, folding flat planes replace Gehry’s expected curvaceous forms. (photo by Zeluloidea on Pexels)

10: Frank Gehry
The stunning collisions of steel, glass, and stone from this Canadian-born American has made him the most famous living architect on the planet. Though often accused of aesthetic sameness—a kind of architectural one-liner—the mastery of his design vocabulary never ceases to impress. With the 1997 completion of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Gehry’s single building attracted so many visitors to the area that the entire economy of the Basque region improved dramatically.

Along the lines of favorites, here are my favorite buildings in Los Angeles, favorite buildings of all time, and most breathtaking buildings of last year.

#87: GROWING UP IN ARCHITECTURE

August 10, 2018

Mills High School, Millbrae, California (photo from carducciassociates.com)

A 1960s cover of Time magazine featured my high school as a building that could be assembled and disassembled with a screwdriver. Though not literally so, the architects of Mills High School made a bold assertion relating an entire school campus as a simple kit-of-parts. Before the recent marketing ploys of prefab homes, this school that I attended comprised prefabricated parts that could be put together like a child’s toy.

Though the high school was comprised of nothing more than several dull institutional buildings, I wonder if the innovative thinking in the school’s design influenced how I experienced architecture.

During these teen years, my family resided in Burlingame, a quiet suburban community a few miles south of San Francisco. Though initially appearing to be not much more than some average tract homes, Burlingame had an architectural legacy unknown to general home buyers. Our little neighborhood contained one of the largest collections of Mid-Century Modern homes by illustrious developer-builder, Joseph Eichler. Over 100 homes.

Eichler homes, Burlingame, California (photos by Anthony Poon)

The streets where I rode my bike, where I learned to drive, and where I played ball, were lined with the iconic architecture of the period. The design vocabulary of clean lines is commonplace now, but back then, it was ground breaking. Eichler explored indoor-outdoor spaces, abundance of natural light, large walls of glass, thin roof lines, open floor plans, carports, and an overall composition of efficiency and elegance.

How did growing up in two such impactful architectural environments influence my future?

East West Bank, Chinatown, San Francisco, California (photo by Anthony Poon)

Prior to living in Burlingame, the urban fabric of San Francisco was home, from the steep streets and Victorian homes of Russian Hill to the patina and history of Chinatown, from a job at a music studio in the Tenderloin of the then decaying Mission District to the deeply fogged-in hillside of South City, and from the hustle bustle glamor of Union Square to the comic book stores of North Beach. This was all an architectural sonata of intensity, risk and exploration.

Hills of San Francisco, Golden Gate Bridge in background, view from Coit Tower, California (photo by Anthony Poon)

I suspect that if I attended a generic suburban high school and not a gutsy innovative architectural work, that if my teen experiences were contained in the Taco-Bell-style tract homes of California and not a community of production homes from one of history’s eminent Mid-Century Modern architects, and that if my childhood was in a city that lacked texture, adventures and delight, I would not be the architect I am today. I believe that somehow the creative and random tapestry of various conditions threaded into my head, and decades later, seeped out of my architectural hands.