Photo: Juergen Nogai
nonzeroarchitecture and its media facilities division studio bau:ton, based in Santa Monica, Calif., have completed overseeing the rebuilding of a commercial property into a state-of-the-art music composition facility at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions. The nearly 7,000-square-foot building includes five composing suites on the ground floor as well as four music edit rooms and a shared lounge with an outdoor deck on the upper level.
The composers occupying the studio suites are Steve Jablonsky (Transformers, Desperate Housewives), Rupert Gregson-Williams (Hotel Rwanda, Over the Hedge), Atli Orvarsson (Vantage Point, Babylon A.D.), John Sponsler and Tom Gire of Magic Music Box and Lorne Balfe.
The suites each include main writing rooms, recording booths, assistants’ studios and equipment rooms. A large skylight over the main hallway is at the center of the clean, contemporary design, and offers relief from working in the dark and hermetically sealed studios. The west-facing lounge on the second floor is placed behind large glass panels serving as a passive solar shading screen and providing privacy. Its fritted pattern of a partial handwritten score by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart continues on the glass below and will be extended across several adjacent buildings in future expansions. Photovoltaic panels will offset the energy-intensive process of creating music for films and television.
The building design is conceived as the starting point for further developments on the eclectic site and includes efforts at multiple scales to build a cohesive urban campus and to create a sustainable, environmentally sensitive neighborhood while reinforcing the strong artistic and social ties between the occupants.
For more information on nonzeroarchitecture and studio bau:ton, visit www.nonzeroarch.com.
