Architecture is frozen music. The building the sound, the space we occupy the silence.
Quoting the father of modern architecture Frank Lloyd Wright I question this overused cliche. Is walking in a well designed building a stagnant experience? Or a human scale point of perception of architecture is a more than dynamic interpretation of the designer’s thoughts translated into material? Posing such questions makes one assume the existence of a boundary, whereas they constitute colourful strands within the braided continuity of human experience. This piece of writing talks about the relation between Music and Architecture as a dynamic one that should be considered in terms of fluidity, variability and overlaps. This is an interesting idea because one could cast doubts on its validity, doubts arising from the fact that we are dealing with an immeasurable situation with far too many variables. Is the relation a result of a spatial form, of the reverberation time, of the position of the audience in particular space or of the particular idea of the composer?
In a recent study on Music, Space and Architecture in Amsterdam Academy of Architecture (Voorthuis, 2012, page 68) states that Architecture and music are produced in stages by ordering of our environment in a design (the virtual space of a drawing or a composition). Next is the performance (the real or actualised space of the design made into a building or the actual performance of a piece of music). Judgements with reference to a spatial experience make us coin sentences like ‘this is architecture’ or ‘this is music’. However just because the word music denotes and judges a spatial experience as a musical one does not necessarily mean that architecture is not simultaneously present as something that is also being undergone. In fact the two are able to complement each other well and the spatial experience of beautiful music contributes to the experience of sublime architecture and vice versa.
Different arts have overlapped and borrowed from each other at varied points in the chronology of human history. All art forms drive towards the two cosmic principles of truth and beauty. In the process of expression, vocabulary of appreciation has been similar in terms of harmony, unity, proportions and rhythm. There has always been borrowing of terminology by the prophesiers of pen. Composers of musical scores could at anytime be heard of talking about the ‘structure of a song’ or ‘texture of a voice’; terms one would generally use for built masses and building materials. Also architects and their critiques have always been heard taking of concepts like ‘rhythm of a facade’ or ‘harmony of element composition’; terminology a layman would use only for music (see Fig.1). From time infinity these two art forms have borrowed more than just terminology. In the past we obtained a complete symphony through architectural works. Presently, we invent flexible, dynamic architectural models by integrating music wave frequencies using computer simulation programs or by de-constructing forms into free separate pixels.
Another borrowed paradigm from music and perhaps one without which architects would never have been able to dimension their drawings is scale. Zooming in from the urban scale (1:1000 or 1:2000) to the very fine construction details (1:5 or 1:10) one can never overlook the abstract ideas of rhythm and harmony of the composition. From a mass on an urban scale to the strategic repetition of construction elements on the façade, every element should be coherent with the core idea of the architect for it to be in the right scale. Just as for a musician would be figuring out the correct pauses in the sound so for an architect is the challenge to bring out the correct tectonic and artistic expression through the rhythm and harmony of the building elements. We have all once in our lifetimes experienced a building which stands out from the rest of the built environment making itself look ugly and out of context. Such built masses are actually a parallel to an off note played by a cringing nervous instrumentalist.
David Byrne (TED Talks 2010), in a sensitive and energetic manner explains the intimate correspondence between music and architecture – specifically, on how architecture has triggered musical evolution. He moves chronologically through different architectural periods, noticing the difference that musical compositions experience with the passing of years. Certain types of music seem to work better for specific places. Rap and hip-hop have their best moments in car sound systems; punk was at its best in asymmetrical and small places like the CBGB, and arias inside Gothic cathedrals —places where a jazz concert, for instance, with its intricate melodies and sharp pitch changes, would not sound to its full potential. Today we can listen to each layer of sound through our iPod’s headphones, and Byrne deduces that this influences the type of music we make. Music is made to fit in with these contexts. Paraphrasing him, the vessel in which one will pour the music is the first thought one has while composing, and then comes the passion and emotion to shape it. To clarify this idea, he uses the example of birds: a bird will not sing in the same way when it is on a tree as when it is on the ground, nor will it sing the same in one part of the world as it does in another. His song —his message— adapts to the environment that contains it. Such examples show one that music is an adaptive means, moulded to fit a physical pre-established frame. Is music written for a specific place? And if it is, is that architectural space a model for creativity?
A research paper by Metkemeijer (2012) supports this hypothesis with a historical chronology of celebrated composers and compositions. It reflects clearly that the way music developed in time was strongly affected by the acoustics of the spaces that were available for playing music. Johann Sebastian Bach composed organ music that suited the relatively dry acoustics of Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Joseph Hayden’s classical music suited the relatively small and upholstered hall of Schloss Esterhazy. In the late 1800’s during the late romantic period, orchestras grew in size when the advancement of building technology made it possible to construct larger halls for larger audience sizes (see Fig.3). Hence the music then produced made use of the stronger late reverberation times and the acoustical properties typical to these halls. The aerial and fluid music that filled the cathedrals became much more textured and rhythmical when the size and shape of the places changed to become something like the Carnegie Hall.
The beginning of this subject appeared in 1958 with the design of the Philips Pavilion (see Fig.4) for the World Expo pavilion in Paris. ‘ Poeme electroniqu ’ by Le Corbusier and Lannis Xenakis was not only a result of research according to the acoustic qualities of form, but also a contemporary expression extending architectural principles, and mainly the ones of functionalism, to the one of music and cinema. The superposition of the hyperbolic external shape, conceived by Lannis Xenakis with the internal one of the ―stomach of a cow conceived by Le Corbusier constitutes thus more than a contradiction to one of the main architectural principles (inside=outside / form follows function) but a deconstruction of its traditional language. On one hand the application of new static construction principles based on hyperbolic mathematical functions on which Lannis Xenakis also based his composition ―’Metastasis’ played inside the building, can be seen as a rational approach to relate space, music and construction through science. The mathematical principles were translated into both time and space; not only in music but also in architecture.
In a design assignment called Ruimte(space)(Spaan,2012,p80), Architect Claudia Schmidt and architect/musician Jurgen Stoye make students analyze a particular music piece. In the process each student distills the building blocks from the musical piece in an intuitive way. Series of rhythmic and tectonic models represent flowing and short rhythms, staccatos and harmonies. The blocks are then translated into architectonic ones and combined into greater parts so as finally to create an architectonic space (see Fig.5). The repetition of building blocks creates the basis for the resulting pavilions. The design goes beyond the formal scope of space and comes to life as a juxtaposition of discovered parts. In these fascinating spaces repetition, rhythm, layering, light, shadow and texture play important roles. The part (building blocks) and the whole (the space) complement each other and a musical composition is transformed into a tectonic structure.
Dewidar, El-Gohary, Nabeel, Salama,(1998 ,p.10) talk about a few architects who have entered a further dimension called the fifth dim. The leader being a British called Marcos Novak who named it the “Fifth Firtuality”. The musical melodies have, therefore, appeared in a new frame. For the project called ‘Paracube’(see Fig.6) , a cuboid was defined by six parametric surfaces, each with its own coordinate system. The parametric equations governing each surface were arranged so that a variation on a particular surface would cause reactions or permutations on adjoining surfaces, effectively creating a topological cube. The parametric cuboid was manipulated to create two forms: a skeletal frame and a smooth skin. Parameterization allowed the smoothness each element to be defined & manipulated through computational formulae; the frame was derived from the same process, where the skin was computed at high smoothness & the skeleton at law smoothness. The skeleton was then mathematically extruded into the fourth dimension by adding a fourth coordinate to every three-dimensional point. Thus, points became lines, lines became polygons, and polygons became cubes and cubes became hyper-cubes. The resulting four-dimensional object was rotated about a plane in four-dimensional spaces according to the appropriate matrix transformations. The transformed object projected back into three-dimension spaces, became a sspace frameof variant dimensions. The skin was not extruded into the fourth dimension but instead remapped to create a rippling, non-homogeneous surface. Such experiments are ways to translate music into architecture by the means of transforming all data and details relating to the project to a group of numbers and algorithms which are reorganized in the shape of mathematical equations and hence surfaces.
With the advent of technological means of translating music into architecture, a further way should be formulated for transforming existing architecture into musical melodies i.e. ways of actually listening to the existing architecture of a place. Such advancements will solve issues of context for architects and with the right expression of tectonics can lead to very harmoniously designed urbanscape. Such design methodologies and approaches will have innumerable sources of inspiration from the existing architecture and hence lead to a better composed built environment. A musical approach to the design of spaces will lead to a more holistic and improvised use and discovery of urban space.
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