Into the Hive

During the Hollyhock House visit at Barnsdall Art Park in East Hollywood of Los Angeles, this piece's initial inspiration came to me. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house with a commission from the house's prospected owner, Aline Barnsdall. The architecture sat atop a hill, filled with ample light of Summery Los Angeles weather. Even from a distance, I could see that its Mayan- inspired exterior is very much unexpected and out of place. It feels as if there is suddenly an archaeological site in the middle of LA. As I get close, I started to see many more details of the design: the hollyhock motif, Aline's favorite flower, lined up along the roof and stained glasses in the windows ornamented with geometric patterns of triangles and hexagons. The walls along the passageway into the house deliberately block the view and light, narrowing the path's dimension down toward the massive entrance doors, entirely made of stone, dimly seen in the dark. Into the Hive seeks to portray the sensation that one would experience to approach the house for the first time. I found from the visit that the architecture's components are similar to that of musical composition. There are structural materials that other materials are built upon and motives that put everything together. So I constructed this piece with the structure in mind - patterns in the bass and range of the instruments that continuously narrows itself down - and motives that feature numbers 3 and 6, inspired by Wright's work that constructs motives by combining simple geometric patterns.