A case study in how small-scale architecture can embody large-scale social and environmental values
In December 2024, the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas, together with DesignConnects and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art—co-commissioners of the 2025 United States Pavilion for the 19th International Biennale Architettura—launched an open call for built projects to be featured in PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity. The exhibition represented contemporary American architecture and design with an emphasis on civic engagement, community building, and social and environmental resiliency.
The Architecture Biennale is part of the Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most prestigious cultural exhibitions, held every two years in Venice, Italy, where countries showcase contemporary art and architecture through national pavilions.
Rethinking the American Threshold
Building on the 2025 Biennale’s theme of “Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective,” the exhibition focused on the built environment and architecture’s contribution to the global climate crisis and the presentation of intelligent solutions toward adaptation and redemption. The porch typology—as a threshold between boundaries, an intermediary space, a gathering place, a tectonic and performative space—became the organizing principle for reimagining architecture’s social and environmental potential.
Exterior view of Music Box showing the wraparound porch and forest setting
Music Box: A Symphony of Connection
Among the submissions that embodied this ethos was “Music Box,” a project that transforms the porch concept into something both intimate and universal. In an era marked by social isolation and estrangement from the natural environment, rediscovering harmony with nature alongside friends and family has become more important than ever.
“Music Box” is a single-room structure with a wraparound porch that’s elevated along the banks of a creek embedded with Cypress trees. Casement windows and accordion doors unfold as the single volume space opens up and spills out into the forest.
As one structure within a string of porched buildings, the entire structure of Music Box is a porch in itself. As the essential counterpart to the urban porch, which connects to the city, Music Box is a rural porch that allows users to connect with nature while strengthening the more intimate relationships of a family.
Interior view showing the Steinway piano with accordion doors opened to the landscape
Material Generosity
Music Box demonstrates environmental stewardship through thoughtful material use. The building is constructed with the very materials it’s surrounded by. Reclaimed “Sinker Cypress,” with alternating bands of board grain color, is utilized in the tongue-and-groove floor planks and wall and ceiling panels. Old work equipment that once carried the owner’s family business, now lives on in the form of the steel pipe framing that holds up the structure. As both a musical stage and place of exercise and meditation, the project reminds us of the importance of social recreation and appreciation of the outdoors.
Site plan showing relationship between building, creek, and existing Cypress trees
The building is home to a Steinway piano and a yoga wall, creating a space for the owners and their loved ones to create music, exercise and meditate, and bond with each other within the symphony of nature.
Interior detail showing yoga wall, Steinway piano, accordion doors and cypress wood materials
A Model for Generous Architecture
Music Box succeeds as a response to PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity because it understands the porch as fundamentally about threshold conditions—between inside and outside, private and public, individual and collective, built and natural. By reimagining these thresholds as fluid and permeable, the project creates a model for architecture that is both generous in spirit and environmentally responsible.
The project demonstrates how contemporary American architecture can address the exhibition’s core challenges: fostering civic engagement through intimate gathering spaces, building community through shared experiences, and achieving environmental resilience through adaptive reuse and site-sensitive design.
At dusk, Music Box glows like a lantern in the forest, embodying the porch’s traditional role as a welcoming threshold between private sanctuary and shared community space.
In extending the simple concept of the porch into a complete architectural philosophy, Music Box demonstrates that generous architecture knows no boundaries of scale or geography. From Venice’s grand stage to Texas Hill Country’s quiet creeks, the principles of connection, threshold, and community remain universal—exactly the kind of generous architecture our times demand, whether celebrated in international exhibitions or lived quietly in the landscapes that surround us.
See the full Music Box Project here.
While Music Box was not selected for PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity at the Biennale Architettura, it exemplifies the universal principles the exhibition sought to promote.