Architecture is often referred to as frozen music.

And the link between them has long been recognized.

What do the buildings we make say about us?

How does our perception of them change when filtered through music?

I'm Seth Bostead, and this is Songs About Buildings and Moods.

Tucked away at the far end of the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Brooklyn, is one of the most beautiful buildings in Brooklyn, the Dime Savings Bank.

Built to resemble a neoclassical temple, this gilded age masterpiece served as the bank lobby for nearly 100 years and is today incorporated into the design of Brooklyn's tallest skyscraper, the Brooklyn Tower.

While the bank was designed to take your breath away and instill confidence with its opulent design, the bank's customers were mostly working-class people and anyone could start a savings account with just a dime, as Marcy Clark explains.

The savings banks were really meant to be visited by the public and the image of monumentality was a really important message to share to the public that this was a place to trust where you could invest your hard-earned dollars and let it grow.

And from the moment that you stepped through the door, you were meant to be in awe throughout your entire procession through the space.

From seeing this monumental colonnade and beautiful red marble to the polychromatic floors with the iconic hexagon frames, the ceilings, the taller windows everything was meant to impress you, and of course the vault, the display of the vault.

Tell me more about the people in the 1930s, 1940s.

What was this area of Brooklyn like?

What kind of people were here and using this bank?

These were the hard-working people of Brooklyn who were coming in to establish an account for just a dime.

These were workers on the ferries, working on some of the first subway tunnels connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn in the early 1900s, and in just 15 years the bank outgrew its space, so they doubled in size and hired a new architecture firm in the 1930s to create what we see here today.

Walk me through the years now.

Let's come up to the present day, the history of the bank and the current project, the Brooklyn Tower.

This is a huge space, this is actually a civic architecture which is not how we think about banks today, when banking is all about technology and mobility to be able to bank on your mobile device.

And banks don't need spaces like this to convey that messaging or to function anymore.

Banks have really started to re- examine their retail footprint.

They don't need to operate in 20,000 square feet like you see here.

They don't need to have a beautiful vault on display as part of their marketing services.

And so these banks have become decommissioned in the 1990s and to present day, and the challenge that we have now as new owners and new stewards is what do we do with these architecturally and historically significant beautiful pieces of architecture?

What's the answer?

The answer is really thoughtful adaptive reuse.

Rather than treating the tower in an overtly historicist manner, taking the neoclassical colonnade and extruding that language into the sky, we instead find the relationships, find the shared geometries.

And so what has happened in that effort is that the beautiful hexagonal floors that you see here in the bank and the triangular shaped site have extended a grid across our development opportunity, and then the tower itself becomes a series of interlocking hexagons.

The residents of the Brooklyn Tower as well as the Brooklyn community will be able to enjoy this space again as a flagship retail location, and we really look forward to opening its doors again.

Do you want to have a contemporary music series here or something?

You know, Friday nights, some wine, string quartet.

Please, all the time.

Okay, all right, because I can make that happen.

One of the things I find most amazing about the Brooklyn Tower is that the vault from the Dime Savings Bank is still intact.

And what a vault it is, with hundreds and hundreds of the original safety deposit boxes still intact.

The many things that people have kept in these boxes over the years was a primary source of inspiration for composer Danielle Eva Schwab.

- Here we are in the vault.

- Here we are.

What an amazing place.

I mean, completely.

I feel like we're in the middle of a heist movie or something.

Is this pretty much what you were imagining?

We haven't been in here before.

Is this what you were imagining it would be?

I think it's actually even better.

Because we've been down here a couple of times and we've been able to look through that giant door that they have guarding the space, but we haven't been inside.

And, yeah, I mean, this is kind of just really a dream space to be in and write for.

What kind of secrets do you think might have been in these boxes?

Oh, I mean, everything.

It could have been love letters, property deeds, certificates of stock purchases.

A lot of the time it's probably things that you want to have hidden from other people that might discover them in your house.

Exactly.

It's like, this it's for me.

So how did the vaults inspire the music?

I mean, the beginning of the piece and the ending really grew out of imagining what might have been in these boxes.

There's a lot of whispering sound effects, which is actually people reading off, like I was saying before, imagined love letters, bank statements, certificates for significant purchases.

Did you use text for that?

Or did you have them whispering?

What are they saying?

I could make something up, but the less romantic answer is that I just pulled things off the end of it, and then kind of tweaked them and wrote some of my own.

And some AI may have been involved too.

So that's the first thing that we hear in the piece, is the voices of perhaps the secrets of the vault.

Okay, and then walk me through it from there.

As you know, we've also been up to the whispering gallery in the space, which is just one of the most incredible acoustic environments that I've ever been in, it has this amazing sort of delay effect.

And this just completely crazy reverb.

And so the piece opens with voices who were whispering and creating interesting textures.

And then we also took a few musicians up there and we really experimented with the acoustics to see what kind of material would work.

And so there's a lot of really cool, repeated figures that feed back on themselves and become really almost chaotic and kind of spacey.

And so we worked with an amazing saxophone player, David Leon, who we took up there and had him record some materials, which I then took back and processed and played with.

And then from there it really unfolds into a large chamber orchestra work.

We got a lot of strings and a lot of winds, and then a lot of singers.

So I guess actually it's chamber orchestra plus choir with a central focus on the American modern ensemble quintet.

Now that I'm saying this, I'm realizing just how many crazy parts there are.

We've been involved with this.

We normally work with three or four musicians.

There's even a couple with two.

And now you're saying chamber orchestra, American modern ensemble and a choir and a saxophonist and a clarinet.

What was it about the space that made you want to go so big?

The space is big.

I think that was really it.

It just felt to me, especially in combination with the tower, you have this large cavernous space in the bank.

And then the tower is Brooklyn's tallest building.

And it has this epic eye of Sauron, Darth Vader kind of feel to it.

It felt like it deserved something large and impressive because it's such a large and impressive space and construction.

And I think also, like we've been talking about since the beginning, this combination of the new and the old.

It was really important to me to have traditional instrumentation, acoustic instruments which have obviously been around for such a long time, but then to integrate that with electronic effects and like delay, interesting sort of delays and processing.

And there will be some synthesizers in it and really just combine this feeling of old and new within the music as well.

Chicago's Wrigley Building is so recognizable that it kind of doesn't need this introduction.

It stands on Michigan Avenue at the Chicago River, and is a luminous symbol of Chicago's incredible architectural legacy.

The Wrigley Building was the very first, and many think the best, of the buildings that have come to be known as the Magnificent Mile.

And thanks to a legal clause, the name can never be changed.

It will forever be the Wrigley Building.

I spoke with Bradley Borowick, the general manager of the Wrigley Building, and I spoke with composer Amy Wurtz.

And I thought it would be fun to let them tell the story of the building and the musical inspiration for it at the same time.

And since Amy is a pianist, she can play some of her themes for us at the piano as well.

So the opening of the piece is kind of ethereal because I always picture this building against this blue sky, which we got today for our filming.

And so it's a little bit soft and evocative.

Give me a sense of the time frame.

Obviously, Wrigley made a lot of money in gum.

This building was going to be a landmark statement for the Wrigley Company, of course.

But the design is just phenomenal.

What do you know about their thought process, the time period in Chicago when it was going up?

Well, they completed the Michigan Avenue Bridge in 1920, and then Mr. Wrigley had purchased this trapezoidal two-pieces of Wrigley property.

He hired Charles Gershman with Graham Anderson-Propesan White, and they sort of came up with this beautiful Beaux-Arts kind of construction of the building, where they were only going to use Terracotta, the clock towers modeled after the Seville Cathedral in Spain.

So there's a lot of international touch and flair to it, but the ornateness is just unbelievable.

And it's not at no expense to put everything, from cherubs to phoenixes, to salamanders, to lions.

How did you approach translating all of that into music?

Well, I took a lot of inspiration from the building itself.

I used a lot of the dimensions of the building, for example, the square footage, or how many different shades of white are in the Terracotta coating, and I used those numbers in my musical material.

But I also was really inspired by the story of William Wrigley.

He is the quintessential American self-made business success story.

He lived in the 1920s, and so I used a lot of sounds of the 1920s to inspire half of the music.

You'll hear a main theme that I wrote, and that was split into two parts because of the two towers of the building.

There's a north tower and a south tower.

And so I had this theme first as a hymn and second as like a jazz tune in the 1920s swing style.

Was it always meant to be two towers connected by a bridge, or did it just kind of grow over time?

No, it was always meant to be two towers in 1921.

They finished the south tower, which is the clock tower, and then in 1924 they actually completed the tower that we're standing on the north tower.

They're over 19 feet, 7 inches.

There's four faces.

There are two master clocks that run them.

They're the most historic part of the building.

It's what everybody thinks of when they see the rebuilding.

The two parts you were talking about that represent the two towers.

Where is that in the piece?

This is my theme first as a hymn.

It gets a solo from the violin.

And here it is.

It's nice, not only is it hymn-like, but it's very American, with the open force in the right hand.

There's the kind of pentatonic-y, almost country blues sound to it as well.

Yes, that's exactly what I was going for.

So much about the Rigby building is iconic, as you mentioned.

You know, the clock tower, the Terracotta, etc.

But also what's iconic about it is its position in Chicago right here at the confluence of the river.

The lake is right down the street, Michigan Avenue is right here.

Was this an iconic location then, like it is now?

I think it was even more of an iconic location.

The Burnham plan had already planned to have the bridge connect what was once Pine Street, now North Michigan Avenue.

So where Michigan Avenue kind of comes straight forward, it actually juts out.

So the property of the two trapezoidal pieces of property for Rigby actually pushes that street out.

So when you're looking from the south, looking to the north, the building looks much larger than what it actually is.

When this was actually built, there was nothing around here except for a soap factory which was across the street.

Nobody ever knew they could ever actually see all of this so high up.

Because they built the building just two feet under the highest level of the city would allow them to build.

That's fascinating, there was not much else around here at all.

This would have just been this gleaming icon with hardly anything around it.

If you look at old photographs, you'll just see factory, factory, and this one white, beautiful turk out of building.

It looks like it stands out like it wasn't supposed to be there.

I've been here for 13 years.

We've overseen this building since we purchased in 2011, that a massive renovation put about 75 to 100 million dollars into the building.

So we have touched every part of this building.

And we know everything about it.

There's an honor and a love to come into this building every day.

It's an honor to take care of it.

I really enjoy the pairing of music and architecture because they are both so fundamentally similar in terms of structure and composition.

I love having a point from which to start for a composition.

Oftentimes starting a piece is the hardest part about it.

And so when you have a dedicated reason to write a piece and something to base it on, that's a huge gift to a composer.