Max Wirsing

The actor and comedian Martin Mull has been quoted as saying that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” The words have since been mis-attributed to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson, and Thelonious Monk. Regardless of the sentence’s provenance, the quote highlights the gap between feeling one art form (such as sound) and translating it into a totally separate medium (like text).

While Mull’s words are a tongue-in-cheek jab at the communication between art forms, Max Wirsing has been trying in earnest to minimize the translational gap between dance and architecture since beginning his study of the built environment in 2018. After a 13-year career as dancer, creating and touring post-modern and contemporary performance work with Twin Cities-based choreographers, he began his Masters in Architecture at Yale University. He has been working at SALA since graduating in 2021.

For Max, both dance and architecture, at their very essence, are studies of bodies in space. Much as dance has the ability to elicit sweeping feelings and emotions in its audience, Max’s approach to architecture revolves around its ability to induce feelings of wonder, joy, and calm. He loves getting to know the daily movements and rituals of clients as part of the design process, and believes that our homes should be as specific and individual as the lives we lead within them. With the conviction that we should never take for granted the ways in which people inhabit their homes, Max appreciates clients who are willing to investigate, reconsider and reimagine the assumptions of their typical living spaces. He believes that by centering the body, its scale, and its relationships to others, we create more functional, beautiful, and personally meaningful homes.