Lenox, Massachusetts, USA

Boston Symphony Orchestra’s “summer house” needed to be expanded, and William Rawn Associates, together with landscape architects Reed Hilderbrandt, were responsible to design the additional structures and landscaping that would encourage new experiences for both the orchestra and the audience.

The project has been awarded a 2021 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The Center for Music and Learning is the first new building at the summer home of this acclaimed symphony orchestra in over a generation.

Since this Summer Festival’s inception in 1937, it has continued to expand its campus to broaden its impact and reach both in the music world and the regional economy.

This project expands that goal in ambitious new ways, with new education programs, talks, and intimate recitals that bring audiences into a deeper understanding of music and music-making.

The project’s four pavilions create the spaces in which the audience and performer can interact in ways that have both a sense of informality and intensity.

This direct connection is new not just for this Music Festival but within the world of classical music.

The Festival is also home to a summer music academy that grants no-cost fellowships to many of the most talented early-career professional musicians in the country.

The new Linde Center for Music and Learning dramatically expands the rehearsal spaces available for the Fellowship program.

The Center for Music and Learning is a 24,000 GSF grouping of four buildings built around a 100’ tall Red Oak tree and connected by a serpentine pathway.

The Center houses an immersive program offering patrons of classical music unprecedented participatory access to world-renowned musicians as they hone their artistic craft.

The mission of the Linde Center is to establish a direct personal connection between audience and performer by dissolving the boundaries of “stage” and “back of house” that typically separate patron and musician.

The intimate scale, broad flexibility, and distance learning capability establish the Center as a music incubator – a place for this world-renowned Orchestra to experiment with new ideas and technologies around classical music and a platform from which to share these ideas globally.

Capturing Intensity and Informality: The Linde Center melds the intensity of music-making at the highest caliber and the informality of its natural setting.

Each studio opens broadly to the landscape, immersing participants and musicians in balanced daylight and framed views of picturesque surroundings.

Visitors can come, explore, even sit in on rehearsals – always with a connection to music-making and the natural environment.

Project: Linde Center for Music and Learning
Architects: William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc.
Design Team: William Rawn, Clifford V. Gayley, Kevin Bergeron, and Elizabeth Bondaryk
Landscape Architects: Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture
Client: Boston Symphony Orchestra
Contractor: Skanska USA Building Inc.
Photographers: Robert Benson