Made possible by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Joanne and Stanley Marder Fund for Innovation, and the Friends of the Coltrane Home, the Comprehensive Site Plan establishes a framework and design proposal for the preservation of John and Alice Coltrane’s legacy and their home in Long Island, NY. The project upholds the characteristics of the site as a sanctuary for visitors to reflect on Coltrane’s contributions to music and meditation while providing space for creativity and making. The CCSP seeks to interpret and highlight John and Alice’s incredible legacy within the context of a meditative forest garden that restores the coastal pine-oak ecology native to the site, while providing a community asset to the Town of Huntington and a regional, national, and worldwide civic and cultural destination that both stays true to its humble domestic setting, yet remains a space of inspiration and peace for a new generation of creatives.

The design extrapolates the major chord changes underlying Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ and draws out the radii of imaginary circles arranged through the forest, upon whose arcing forms the meditative paths were then laced throughout to create a dynamic, yet ordered, meditative walking trail. The concept thus seeks to express the dynamism of music —guided, at all times, by an underlying arrangement amid the seeming disorder of the forest — through an embodied experience of movement in space, rather than sound.

Role: Project Manager (while employed at Nelson Byrd Woltz)

Location: Dix Hills, New York

Client: The National Trust for Historic Preservation

Owner: Friends of the Coltrane Home

Collaborators: MASS, Thornton Tomasetti, AEA Consulting

Type: Civic/ Institution

Scale: 3 acres

Phase / Date: Comprehensive Plan 2020