Music Row Modern is a 2-story commercial office building with subterranean basement parking located at the end of Music Row, one of Nashville’s most storied historic districts.
Faced with a small abnormally shaped corner lot and very restrictive historic overlay requirements on a famous stretch of Nashville's acclaimed "music row", the design response demanded that it should adapt to varying degrees of different contextual responses around the site while providing all the necessary functions and program requirements of the office tenant.
Taking advantage of the rear sloping site, the parking was hidden away and underneath and accessed from the rear alley so that the building itself could meet the sidewalks on a pedestrian scale. Scale and context were of the utmost importance as the building fronts toward 17th Avenue South, known famously as Music Row. The older historic 2-story adjacent homes drove the design discussion immediately. The front facing 2-story gable element lowers itself and orients the building in perfect alignment with the rhythm and spacing that exists along 17th. Because this corner site is 23 degrees off square, the building turns to align and another taller gable element provides a different contextual response . Oriented now to the adjacent side street, it responds to the adjacent large scale university buildings nearby.
On the building itself, large box shades around the southern facing fenestration playfully march up and away from the building corner to provide passive solar shading. As the building wraps the site and around the alley, it conceals within it a private courtyard that provides an outdoor amenity while providing privacy and natural daylighting for the interior. All of the materials and colors that were selected display a certain amount of modernity while respecting the history of the neighborhood.
