Salton Sea Opera

If you have a copy of GSD Platform 2, the annual tome of student work produced at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, then you may have come across a project for the Salton Sea Opera pictured above. The project, the work of graduate student Erin Kasimow, was completed as part of a studio organized last year by Mack Scogin. In line with the studio concept students were asked to select a site, and in response the instructor selected a program.

Salton Sea is a lake in California that is more than 35 miles long and fraught with all the melodrama that one would associate with opera. The lake as it stands today was created in 1905 when a swell in the Colorado River over ran the Alamo Canal and filled in a sink over a period of two years. During the 1920’s the area became a tourist attraction as well as a fishery and home to several species of migratory birds. Over time however, the lack of outflow at the lake produced high levels of salinity, which when coupled with industrial run off, has killed local wildlife and turned much of the lake’s perimeter into a wasteland.

The project is compelling in its success at registering the contradictions, conditions and story of the place. Located on an island in the north edge of the lake, the building is sited at the mouth of the Alamo River, the same river which created the lake, but also delivers its toxic levels of salt and chemical run off.

The figure of the building resembles the remains of a squatting prehistoric bird or some other strange creature which might have once occupied the site. The form and program are organized around a centralized fly tower, from which the primary auditorium and several auxiliary performance spaces are suspended in a careful compositional balance – an idea which is interesting given the lake’s constant state of flux.

An exaggerated series of ramps traverse the volumes and allow visitors to oscillate between the experience of the site and the experience of opera, effectively conflating the two. There is an interesting tension here in that from the exterior the building functions as an image as bizarre as the lake itself, yet the interior experience of the building is focused on the performance of opera and viewing the site, and to some extent erodes our awareness of the building at all.

Like other opera houses the project is a beacon, but rather than symbolizing urban or cultural renewal, the Salton Sea Opera is a carefully calibrated reflection of place.