Nenromancers

When Tod Williams and Billie Tsien moved in together, they joined the ever growing ranks of architects who find time for love only in the office,

but few teams feed off each other as gleefully. At work,

Tod is enamored of materials and forms—he's the most likely to be caressing a piece of Texas fossil stone or translucent resin. Billie adds the metaphysical framework.

With the design of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, the two have taken on architecture's most daunting task: building in the shadow of a revered masterpiece.

The institute—where construction began last month and is scheduled for completion in the fall of 1994— will be a scientist's paradise, a veritable mind gym, where Nobel laureates can go to cross-train their brains and work out ideas with colleagues. The site? Three-quarters of a mile down the road from the ultimate scientific monastery, Louis Kahn's Salk Institute.

Undaunted, the couple is not building one more ivory tower. Billie sees their mission as allowing for a multiplicity of presences. The soft-spoken sage is bent on inventing a world buzzing with ideas that isn't closed to the intellectual wilderness outside. "I'm not so comfortable

with the Salk, because it is so didactic,'' she explains. "It's a monastic space that looks into itself.'' For Tod, who once worked under Richard Meier, it is the Salk's inward quality that gives the building its glorious presence. "I love it because it's a transcendental space,'' he says.

Together, the couple has designed a colony where scientists will drift through various places of contemplation, but will not be cut off from the larger universe outside. The architects embedded the project in the side of a hill, the three buildings forming a semi-enclosed forum. Unlike the idyllic setting of the Salk—coastal ravines and dramatic cliffs—the institute sits in a decaying research park, so at its core will be an auditorium that will sometimes hum with the sounds of the violin.

"They are wonderfully gifted,'' says Gerald Edelman, the Nobel Prize winner and former concert violinist who inspired the project. "Even an architect doesn't function well without a well-developed brain.'' In this case, two brains. —NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF