First came the announcement that Scearce had been commissioned by a New York opera company to compose a new opera – a signature honor and an opportunity to burnish his reputation as a rising talent.

That was followed less than a week later by reports that Scearce had found inspiration in a darkly stylish horror novel and was moving to secure the dramatic rights from the author.

Then came news that the composer would team up with New York playwright Lucy Thurber to adapt the book for an entirely new genre of their own creation: opera noir.

Anything Goes

“We’re stretching the form,” Scearce said in a recent interview, scheduled in the middle of a daylong collaboration with Thurber. “Opera lovers will look critically to see if we succeed. If we do, we’ll bring new converts into the fold.”

Growing the audience for opera would be an enormous achievement. Although many major American cities have an opera company, few have the resources to underwrite new works, even if they wanted to take the risk.

But if Scearce and Thurber feel the weight of high expectations, neither shows it. In fact, during the interview they seemed like kids in a candy shop, eager to overindulge.

“Opera is tremendous fun,” Thurber said. “Anything goes. There’s no subtlety in it.”

The Power of the Dark Side

When Scearce received the commission from the Center for Contemporary Opera, along with funding from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, he first considered setting his music to an original story. But he’s a longtime fan of William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel, “Falling Angel,” unique for its genre-crossing storyline – part hardboiled detective novel, part supernatural thriller.

Scearce is a prolific composer with more than 60 compositions in his active catalogue. Photos by Becky Kirkland.

Movie buffs will remember the story from the graphic 1987 film adaptation, “Angel Heart,” starring Mickey Rourke as a private investigator, Robert De Niro as the devil and Lisa Bonet as a voodoo priestess.

When Scearce found out the author still owned most of the non-film rights, he moved fast and inked a deal to option the novel for his new opera.

Thurber said it was a smart decision.

“It would make a killer opera,” she told Scearce. “It has everything you look for: huge drama and very clear archetypes.”

“There’s no better archetype than Satan,” Scearce agreed.

Touched by an Angel

The devil may give the collaboration its spark, but it was an angel that brought the artists together – in the form of a seed grant from the College of Design, where Scearce recently received tenure as a professor of art and design. The college’s Strategic Research Fund awarded Scearce a grant this spring so he could interview potential librettists for the project in New York.

“Lucy stood out,” Scearce said. “She gave me four plays to read and I loved them all. I love all her work.”

The feeling is mutual.

“I find life to be a beautiful, dark and funny thing,” Thurber said. “Mark’s music is deeply romantic, and I’m deeply romantic. So there’s a shared sensibility. We were predestined to work together.”

Scearce is director of the music department at NC State. He won the Raleigh Medal of Arts in 2010 and the prestigious Sackler Prize in music composition in 2009. His works for orchestra, chorus, chamber, opera and ballet have been performed worldwide and are available on seven commercial recordings.

Thurber, the author of 10 plays, won the Gary Bonasorte Memorial Prize for Playwriting in 2008 and a Manhattan Theatre Club Playwriting Fellowship in 2000. She teaches at New York University and Sarah Lawrence College.

“Falling Angel” will receive its world premiere at the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York in the fall of 2015. It may be performed in Europe and the United States, including North Carolina, after its New York run.

“The house has at its roots a North Carolina vernacular,” says architect Marvin Malecha, who led the design effort. “It feels very comfortable. There’s a kind of calmness in the floor plan.”

As you walk through the wide front door, the house opens up to you, inviting you to turn right into a cozy study or left into an expansive dining room. It also moves you forward in time, bringing you into a world that is unmistakably modern.

That’s by design.

“Everything has been simplified,” Malecha explains. “Sitting in the house, it feels very traditional, but also very modern.”

The award-winning kitchen in the chancellor’s residence features clean lines and clean plates. Click photo for larger view.

Room of the Year

Perhaps no room reflects this subtle blending of clean lines and Southern grace as much as the kitchen, where a teakettle warms on top of a gas stove easily capable of serving a dozen dinner guests. Columns of sunlit white cabinets are mirrored in the polished black granite of a large central island beneath a cathedral ceiling.

It’s at once inspiring and familiar, a paean to a time when the kitchen was the heart of family life, and the daily rituals of life were shared – as much as food – around  its counters, cutting boards and kettles.

The success of the design team in creating this engaging environment was recognized by the National Association of Home Builders last month, when it named the kitchen “Room of the Year” in its 2012 Best in American Living Awards.

For Malecha, dean of NC State’s College of Design, the award proves the power of the vision that guided the project over a half-dozen years under nearly as many chancellors. It’s a vision shaped by the ideas and aspirations of donors, trustees, planners and architects but crafted – mostly by hand – by the dean himself, who shepherded the project to completion during daily visits to the construction site.

“It was a very complex project, with many members of the university community wanting involvement. It was more complicated than working with a church group,” he says, only half joking. “Instead of seeing that as an impediment, you have to turn it into a strength.”

The interior of the new chancellor’s residence is unmistakably modern. Click for larger view.

Intense Listening

As planning progressed, Malecha became not only lead designer on the project but also chief facilitator.

“The first skill in the process is intense listening,” he says. “You not only have to work with people to generate ideas, you have to be able to interpret those ideas.”

One of the ideas for the kitchen came from Jim Woodward, interim chancellor when construction began in 2010. He envisioned a comfortable room where six or eight people could stand around and talk. Easy to accomplish in an intimate space; challenging to pull off in a kitchen fit for a catering firm.

In the end, Malecha designed the room to serve families, not just functions.

“When you walk into the kitchen you feel like you’ve come into a family room,” he says. “The room has a sense of coherence. It’s open and bright. There’s outside light from all four directions. The counter welcomes you to come and have a cup of coffee.”

Like much of the house, the kitchen proudly displays its North Carolina roots. The big metal hood over the stove was handmade in the state.

“It’s as much a work of art as a vent hood,” Malecha observes.

The residence was designed to serve families, not just functions. Click for larger view.

In fact, the 15-month construction project was a kind of “mini-stimulus” program for North Carolina craftsmen, artists and builders. The beautiful cypress and poplar detailing seen throughout much of the house was harvested from Hofmann Forest in the coastal region of North Carolina.

Reflecting the university’s commitment to sustainability, the house incorporates the latest energy-efficient technologies. Geothermal heating and cooling and sustainable materials are used throughout. Continuous foam insulation and advanced HVAC controls contribute to energy efficiency and comfort.

“Good architecture always begins with those principles,” Malecha says.

Malecha wants the home to be sustainable in another sense. He wants it to endure, to serve the university’s needs well into the century ahead.

The new residence overlooks Lake Raleigh on Centennial Campus. Click for larger view.

“I designed this house not for the university’s 125th anniversary but for its 200th,” he says.

It’s likely that as plans for the bicentennial celebration are spread out, and university officials put their heads together to give meaning to Wolfpack pride in 2087, they’ll do it around the big granite countertop in the kitchen of the chancellor’s residence.

“I think about what this house will mean to that party,” Malecha muses. “I think about this house across time.”

About the Point

The chancellor’s residence, known as the Point, was completed in the fall of 2011. It includes the 5,400-square-foot “public” space on the ground floor, and a private living area upstairs, encompassing 3,100 square feet.

The project cost $3.5 million, none of which came from public or state-appropriated dollars. Instead, private donors made the Point a reality with their dollars and in-kind donations, like furnishings.

The residence was designed by Malecha and Weinstein Friedlein Architects in Raleigh and Carrboro, N.C., and built by Rufty Homes Inc. of Cary. The interior design and merchandizing were done by Raleigh-based Design Lines Ltd. NC State served as developer and land planner for the project.

“We need a reason for locals to stay and for people to visit,” he says.

Invigorating a Community

This sentiment is popular across Ramseur, where thriving textile, cotton, furniture and lumber mills have disappeared or shrunken, taking with them many young people with aspirations beyond blue-collar work. The recent dismantlement of the region’s largest textile factory, Ramtex Inc., which once employed 1,200 people, symbolized an end to a more prosperous era. But a movement exists to revamp the town and make the Main Street area a destination.

“Ramseur offers supreme quality of life, hunting, safety and kind people,” says Kevin Franklin, the town administrator.

Scott Resch is the new owner of Ramseur’s diner on Main Street.

“We think this is a terrific place to live and wish to enhance that.”

One big step for Franklin’s office was collaborating with the College of Design’s Community Design Initiative (CDI), a 15-year-old program led by Research Associate Professor and Coordinator for Research and Extension Jay Tomlinson. CDI helps rebuild and invigorate North Carolina’s country towns through planning and designing attractive community areas consistent with the region’s history and culture.

“The idea is giving residents a vision beneficial for them and their community. We help instigate the dream,” Tomlinson says.

Tomlinson and his students worked as consultants in Ramseur for two years, helping steer efforts to reinvigorate the Main Street area. Last month they delivered their final report. Suggestions included building a small amphitheater off of Main Street, hosting an annual spring river festival, renovating the old mill warehouse and converting abandoned shops to more eateries, like the new diner, and artist studios. They also suggested installing signage along U.S. Highway 64 and helped create a logo with the motto: “Ramseur: Where Family and Friends Meet.”

“Ramseur has huge potential,” says alumna Irene Sadler Judge who began working on the project as a student a year ago. “The topography on Main Street makes for a dynamic atmostphere, and the river can be used for canoes, kayaks and fishing while the rail trail behind Main Street can be revitalized. We see a bright future.”

Challenges Ahead

But revitalizing any community takes time. Franklin says when the CDI first met with residents and played the “design game,” a board game Tomlinson created to help locals become involved in the town’s redesign, people suddenly saw what is entailed.

“Planning, zoning and working with property owners is complex,” Franklin says.

Main Street has some commerce including a bank, library, post office, tattoo parlor and a Mexican convenience store, but some storefronts need sprucing up and there remain few cosmopolitan things to do. Former commissioner Mike Campbell says he loves his town but his young sons yearn for simple things – like buying an ice cream and sitting somewhere nice outside as they do when visiting nearby Asheboro.

Campbell hopes more commerce will come and churches, which host local festivals with hot dogs and cotton candy, can cultivate more frequent events.

Franklin adds that the N.C. Cooperative Extension Office is helping to develop an agribusiness such as a potential farmer’s market collaborating with the nearby Millstone Creek Orchards to sell peaches and apples along with a storefront for Ramseur’s locally-raised meat. This could attract tourists from around the Triangle. And the CDI will continue guiding Ramseur. Tomlinson offers ongoing counsel to town administrators he helped two decades ago. Ramseur will be no exception.

“It’s our job as a land-grant institution to help small towns get back on track.”

Since its inception in 1899, ASLA has inducted only 158 honorary members. Moore co-founded the ASLA Professional Practice Network on children’s outdoor environments in 2009. In 2001 he received the Great American Gardeners Landscape Design Award from the American Horticultural Societyfor his pioneering work on children’s outdoor environments. Read more.

It was a great idea. The rain garden would function as an attractive and inviting social space for student study and recreation while protecting the ecology in the area and creating a micro-habitat where butterflies and other pollinators can survive.

A painting of the project design.

The newly unveiled Lee Hall Rain Garden achieves all of this and is part of an ongoing effort by the College of Design’s Department of Landscape Architecture and University Housing. The projects transform student accommodation by incorporating real sustainable construction projects into the curriculum. Students of landscape architecture get credit for participating.

“The whole campus is ripe with opportunities like this,” says Fox, an assistant professor of landscape architecture.

Busy at Work

Heather Rhymes, Danielle Toronyi, Johnson Bullard and Bob Shafer were the four graduate students tasked with beautifying and restoring the area behind Lee Hall. This meant working with University Housing and the design and construction services department over the summer to survey the area and design and construct a stormwater management system.

“We worked quickly and wore multiple hats,” Toronyi says.

For a project this large, the students struggled staying inside their modest budget and learned how to manage a team of 25 construction workers. And at the end of the day the project had to be beautiful, but also functional.

“Rain gardens slow water down the same way that nature does. These systems are engineered to mimic the natural systems you see in the woods,” Fox says.

The rain garden now prevents ponding, which attracts mosquitoes and other problems, and protects the newly restored Rocky Branch, an urban creek running through campus. The new rain garden contains a wide well with gravel and a perforated pipe. This filters contaminants which could otherwise flow into Rocky Branch.

“Without the rain garden, ongoing stagnant rainwater could deplete the stream’s ecology,” Fox says.

The patchwork design of the garden duplicates the patchwork of the building.

An Uplifting Experience

On a cool October morning Rhymes points out her favorite bits. She loves that the patchwork design of the garden duplicates the patchwork of the building. She adores the daylilies – these are thriving and have already bloomed twice- and the tranquility.

“Phase two of the design will include seating. This will be a study oasis,” she says.

Rhymes will seek a career in retrofitting upon graduating in May. Rain gardens have been around for 20-plus years, Fox says, but more big-city landscape architects are using low-impact development areas to deal with municipal stormwater. Creating these projects on NC State’s campus benefits everybody, he says.

“We take under-used land and make it something beautiful. Our students can learn on the job, be creative and give back.”

“Uncovering Southwest Raleigh” is a cooperative effort between the city of Raleigh’s community services department, the College of Design, the Poole College of Management and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The project will analyze how the district has evolved, what physical, economic and cultural resources are available and how those living, working and invested here perceive the district and the future of its neighborhoods. The project also hopes to develop strategies and resources to assist the community. A kick-off meeting for the 18-month long project is scheduled on Tuesday, Oct. 23 at 6 p.m. at the McKimmon Center. Read more.

The opening reception will be held from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 22, at the Japan Center, located on the Dorothea Dix Campus at 705 Barbour Drive in Raleigh. The event includes a Shizuoka tea sampling and presentation at 4:30 p.m. and an artist gallery talk at 5 p.m. Read more.