You recently renovated the Hollywood Bowl, and the Wild Beast has been referred to as a mini Hollywood Bowl—what, if any, similar architectural aspects do the two buildings have?

They don’t really have anything similar except their requirements for different musical performances. For the Hollywood Bowl, in which we actually rebuilt the iconic shell to be one-third larger than the old shell, we designed for classical music, rock and jazz, each of which requires different acoustic criteria. It’s the same for the pavilion: You have students who are singing opera or playing anything from jazz to gamelan, and those require different things acoustically. So both have been designed to accommodate many styles of music.

How did the initial fabric model for the building ultimately help shape the finished building?

That is a very interesting concept. The project got started as a very lightweight, tent-sized structure. This is a zone that has strict fire regulations, so we obviously couldn’t use fabric, but the idea was for a very light structure, almost like a sail. We achieved that with the thin, curving roof, which has no support at one end—it’s a big cantilever. It has very solid elements, like the clerestory windows above, which are like these hydraulic spiders between the proscenium and the roof. So the shape of the building came more from the idea that it should appear as if fabric were stretching over it, but be very substantial.

The interior curves and shapes are made of what, and how do they absorb or reflect sound?

It’s very complicated; there are all different types of criteria that went into it. Basically it is an artistic and acoustic balance between the patterns of the curved ceiling panels and the patterns on the side wall. We worked hard on fulfilling the acoustic requirements while having patterns that were not in discord with each other. While we resolved it acoustically, we also needed to create a harmony in terms of patterning, so we used the motif of the slight curvature of the wall also. We were able to find panels with that curvature from large, plywood printing drums with all different diameters. Our office still likes to use the off-the-shelf components: If we can find something that already exists, we prefer that. In this case, we didn’t have to bend the wood; we were lucky to find that perfect curve in the printing drums.

The site appears very limited—were there any spatial challenges to overcome?

Well, the building is sunken from the pathway surrounding it, so we were actually very interested in providing a pathway that would start at the parking lot and swoop around as much as possible so people can really see the structure from very different vantage points and it doesn’t get lost. The whole pathway was designed to be a choreography; it loops and swings all the way around the back of the building. Craig jokes that it’s the tail of the Wild Beast.

You said the Wild Beast was a sort of counterpoint to CalArts’ large five-level instructional building. How does this temper that architecturally?

Because it’s now the first building you see, we tried to keep it very lightweight, so when you look at it, it doesn’t look like it has any major structure to it. It is half-buried on one side with landscaping—well, eventually it will be—so it rises up and serves as a better introduction to the larger building next to it. It is, in a way, a kind of entry pavilion to the campus.

What does the Wild Beast look like to you, and were you surprised by any part of the outcome?

Even though we were inspired by looking at musical instruments, I don’t think it looks like an instrument, and my hope is that people will read into the building differently, without one single image coming to mind. What came as a surprise to me is how voluptuous it is, which is not something we had anticipated. That was a really pleasant surprise.