HGA has won the 2023 AIA Architecture Award for the Marlboro Music Reich Hall Rehearsal Building & Music Library on the renowned music campus in Vermont. The prestigious national award recognizes outstanding contemporary architecture and the “many ways buildings and spaces can improve our lives,” according to the awards program.
The award is a capstone to an artistically successful partnership the HGA design team, led by Joan M. Soranno, FAIA, and John Cook, FAIA, has shared with Marlboro Music over the years, previously collaborating on five cottages for visiting musicians in 2014 and a residence hall for students in 2020.
“Reich Hall’s architecture embodies the intrinsic link between music and space,” Soranno said. “The celebration of music, creativity, and community that happens across campus and in and around these new buildings is a joy to experience. We are grateful to our client for providing the opportunity to collaborate with them on this beautiful campus.”
Design Influence
Every summer since 1951, world-renowned classical musicians have gathered for a seven-week festival focused on creative collaboration on this bucolic campus that once included a small college. Soranno and Cook drew their design inspiration from the dwellings of 17th-century English settlers and simple Cape Cods, here reinterpreted in the previously completed five cottages and student residence hall.
In approaching the design of Reich Hall, HGA’s integrated team of architects, engineers, interior, lighting, and landscape designers worked collaboratively to continue this aesthetic with an acoustically sophisticated environment for festival musical rehearsals, a music library, offices, and gathering spaces.
Gabled forms set the template, with the building’s small footprint, sloped roofs, compact volumes, and local materials reinforcing Marlboro Music’s place within the rolling hills and streams of the Green Mountains. The building itself is nestled into the hillside, with the second floor relating to the upper campus and the first floor aligning with the lower campus.
Inside, the lobby’s low ceiling allows the full volumes of the library and rehearsal rooms to soar. Wood surfaces in the rehearsal rooms evoke instruments themselves. Rippling wood grain and knots of varied sizes coalesce with locally sourced white pine slats to support an acoustically “dry” space, in which musicians can hear their instruments and voices with no ambient interruptions.
Reich Hall also integrates several sustainable design initiatives, discretely hidden within the architecture to spotlight the building’s beauty and the surrounding landscape. Features include LED lighting, a passive solar gains strategy, a green roof, operable windows that provide natural ventilation, and native plantings. Additionally, an energy-efficient geothermal well field provides chilled and hot water through a radiant floor and fan coil system.
“HGA’s beautiful design, thoughtfully integrated into the natural surroundings of our historic campus, will ensure that we can continue to provide talented musicians a place for great music, learning, culture, and community for another 70 years,” said Philip Maneval, Manager of Marlboro Music.
Design Legacy
This is Soranno and Cook’s fourth national AIA Architecture Award. They previously won for the Walker Art Center Expansion (2021), Lakewood Cemetery Garden Mausoleum (2014), and Bigelow Chapel at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities (2006). This also marks HGA’s eighth AIA Architecture Award, including the Minnesota State Capitol Restoration (2020).
About the AIA Award
The 2023 AIA Architecture Award celebrates the best contemporary architecture by members of the American Institute of Architects. A panel of architects representing firms across the country evaluated the award submissions. The award will be presented at the AIA Conference on Architecture, June 7 – 10, 2023, in San Francisco.
In addition to the AIA Architecture Award, Reich Hall recently won a 2023 Architecture & Interiors Awards Merit Award, a 2022 AIA Minnesota Honor Award, and a 2022 ASLA Minnesota Merit Award.
Find the full design story and project partners here.
