Utilising the creative processes of musicians, actors and artists can enrich architectural design. Musicians’ improvisation teaches architects to treat the early design phase as a dynamic jam: sketch freely, iterate rapidly, and welcome unexpected turns. As one design theorist puts it, improvisation is “largely iteration and failure, building new small ideas to be combined in new and interesting ways”.
In practice, this means producing many quick variations of a form (a kind of riff), testing them and putting the variations together – just as jazz musicians prepare by practising scales, but leaving room for spontaneity. The jam session version of architecture is the charrette.
In a well-run charrette, participants break down hierarchies so that “everyone is expected to contribute and no one is seen as superior, regardless of title or position”. This mirrors a musical ensemble where each player listens and responds. Such collaborative workshops can be truly improvised: architects, engineers, clients and users work on ideas together, rather than a single “hero” architect dictating the form. Architects can explore new concepts by embracing ambiguity and “playing” with design elements. In fact, architecture itself often reflects musical spontaneity – the bold colours, intricate patterns and unexpected details in New Orleans buildings, for example, are a nod to the city’s jazz heritage.
- Repeat and “riff” on ideas: Draw multiple variants of a concept as musicians develop riffs. Use physical models or quick digital sketches to explore “what if?” scenarios.
- Collaborative “jam sessions”: Organise open charrettes or idea workshops. Like a community, mix architects with stakeholders (engineers, landscape designers, users) so that all voices can spark new ideas.
- Embrace uncertainty: Start designing even if you don’t have a perfect plan. In music one learns by playing; in design one learns by doing. Treat the blank drawing paper like a silent stage – the design only starts to sing when it “starts”.
Narrative and Character in Space
Actors and playwrights create stories with pace, tension and emotional arcs; architects can do the same in space. Think of a building as a stage production: every entrance is an opening act, every transition a scene change, and every destination a climax. Theatre dramaturgy offers an “invisible logic” for design – planning how tension will build and resolve as people move through the space. For example, a grand staircase can function as a crescendo, a window or spotlight as a revelation. In practice, architects choreograph the spatial narrative: they sequence rooms so that movement feels like a journey. One technique is to design a design in “curtains”: a lobby can be Curtain 1 (threshold), a central hall Curtain 2 (performance space) and private cabins Curtain 3 (privacy). In this way, architects “like scriptwriters or stage directors” decide what each space means and how it makes people feel.
Just as actors build characters, architects must empathise with users. Some architects adopt ‘method acting’, mentally entering different roles (manager, patient, visitor, carer) to see if the design serves them all. This empathy-oriented approach ensures that the spatial narrative really resonates with real people. Exhibition designers in museums or galleries already use these ideas: visitors do not passively watch an exhibition, but “actively move through it”, like dancers in a choreography. They organise exhibitions as thematic “acts”, anticipating how the viewer will flow from one “scene” to another. In each case, designers plan circulation, lighting and moments of pause, as they plan the rising action and catharsis of a story.
Mastery, Repetition and Timelessness
Classical musicianship emphasises discipline and mastery through repetition – study scales, refine technique, polish each phrase. In the same way, architects achieve elegance and timelessness by meticulously refining details. The master architect Carlo Scarpa is a classic example: Scarpa obsessively repeated patterns (brick courses, mouldings, window joints) at multiple scales, using each as a motif to elevate the building. As one scholar observed, Scarpa’s work “masters every nook and cranny” – every doorjamb, stair rail and change of level is carefully rendered, giving “depth and vitality to each of his ‘rooms'”. This mirrors a violinist practising a difficult trill or a pianist polishing a passage until they can play it clearly.
- Master the details by repetition: Identify a design motif (e.g. a window pattern, railing profile or tile joint) and develop it extensively. The repetition of such details – like musical themes – creates a consistent rhythm. Scarpa even repeated the same joint detail at different scales, turning it into a structural and visual refrain.
- Balance restraint and variety: Classical music teaches that restraint (form, harmony, proportion) is the basis of beauty. Architects achieve a similar effect by using proportion and symmetry (echoing musical harmony). For example, classical layouts or modular grids act like musical scales. A brick bond or colonnade can be likened to a musical metre: regular, learnt and resonant.
- Embrace craftsmanship: Skilful musical performance gives a timeless sense of artistry; architecture gains the same by reintroducing craft. As in Scarpa’s work, the use of traditional techniques (hand-carved wood, honed stone) combined with modern formalities connects a building to a deeper history. This disciplined commitment to material and execution gives the buildings a quiet strength and elegance that often gives them a “timeless” feel.
Painterly Composition and Atmosphere
Painters shape space through figure-ground composition, colour harmony and abstraction; architects can borrow these conceptions to enrich the spatial atmosphere. For example, the idea of figure versus ground in painting – deciding which shapes stand out and which recede – is reflected in architecture as a balancing of solid and void, foreground facades and background courtyards. An architect can consciously layer volumes in the same way a painter layers shapes, ensuring that one form is constantly “read” as the focal figure while others serve as background. This sensitivity to composition creates depth and visual interest in a building or city block.
Colour theory is another bridge: many architects (e.g. Le Corbusier) understood colour like a painter. Le Corbusier developed a structured palette of “constructive” (earthy) and “dynamic” (vivid primary) colours to evoke mood and emphasise forms. In his residences in Chandigarh or Marseille, he applied bright hues as accents against neutral concrete, creating focal points that energise the space. Architects channel emotions by carefully selecting and repeating colours (similar to a painter’s palette): warm ochres to calm, rich blues to focus, contrasting reds or yellows to dramatise a portal or column.
Likewise, abstraction in painting has directly inspired architectural form. Think of Piet Mondrian’s grids of primary colours: Gerrit Rietveld literally turned Mondrian’s canvases into walls and planes in the Schroeder House. Theo van Doesburg treated the interior of a dance hall as a “habitable painting”, wrapping its walls and ceiling with oblique grids and blocks of colour.
Even Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, with its floating marble planes and glass walls, can be seen as a three-dimensional echo of Mondrian’s compositions. These examples show that an abstract painter’s emphasis on geometric balance and colour harmony can guide architectural composition: playing with planar forms, allowing open spaces to act as “negative space” and using colour accents as visual punctuation.
Transient Performance and Flexible Planning
Finally, performance art and site-specific installations teach planners to relax rigid master plans. Instead of permanently zoning space, cities can allow temporary interventions that activate and test uses. For example, the Concéntrico festival (Logroño, Spain) annually opens up the city’s streets and squares to temporary structures: one year a pop-up pool sits above a fountain, another year a roundabout hosts a communal bathhouse. These actions are more than spectacles, they are “political statements” that question traditional urban priorities and ask how infrastructure can be shifted “from control to care”. In reality the city becomes a laboratory: pop-up plazas, street theatres, community dinners.
Similarly, participatory and time-based art emphasises public space as a living process. Artists often work outside official plans and use simple gestures (a painted pedestrian crossing, a fabric corridor, a flash mob) to prove a point. These actions “treat the city as a space of friction and imagination” and show that spaces are not fixed but can be reinterpreted. Urban planners can learn from this by incorporating flexibility: Allowing “tactical urbanism” projects, approving temporary parking spaces or markets, and engaging communities in short-term pilots. Instead of viewing zoning as immutable, planners can treat streets and vacant lots as public stages open to design “performances” that reveal hidden needs. In sum, performance art encourages architects and planners to embrace temporality: sometimes the best way to plan the future of a street or neighbourhood is to try something temporary today.
In all these ways, cross-pollination with art invites architects to design with rhythm, story and sensitivity. By learning to improvise like a jazz ensemble, direct space like a theatre stage, refine like a virtuoso musician, compose like a painter, and plan like a spatially sensitive artist, architects can create buildings and cities that are more alive, humane, and resonant.