The project reads three settings from Dvořák's opera as architectural instructions. The Lake and Forest: nature, innocence, a moonlit woodland. The Castle: human society, hard lines, grandeur at a cost. Moonlight: the force that connects both worlds and signals transformation throughout the opera.

Those settings land on St. Rampart Street, New Orleans, during Mardi Gras, organized through the balcony. In New Orleans, the balcony is the threshold where private life opens onto public celebration. For this project, it becomes the building's organizing device.

The balcony works three ways: as a viewing platform looking out over the parade, as the edge where private rooms meet the street below, and as the connective tissue that physically links the building's parts. The design was tested against all three readings simultaneously.

A site plan tracks the carnival parade and tram routes through the block. A separate circulation study overlays opera audience movement against parade crowd movement, working out how both can share one building without colliding.

Floor plans at three levels, three elevation studies, and physical study models tested the balcony concept against the actual constraints of a working opera house in a city that has been using its balconies for spectacle for three hundred years.