The Architectonics of Music

A composition is like a house you can walk around in.

John Cage

Music, like architecture, is an immersive experience—it surrounds you. One can turn away from a painting or a work of sculpture, while music and architecture engulf the body in space.

The "Architectonics of Music" portfolio includes a selection of four projects that test new architectural languages, formed by the cross-disciplinary link between architecture and music.

Tesseracts of Time, the collaboration with the choreographer Jessica Lang, was provoked by the fact that architecture and dance are at opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to time: lasting vs. ephemeral, but could merge in a compression of space and time. The music, by composers David Lang, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, and Arvo Pärt, was chosen for its geometric potential.

Looking at music composition, the Stretto House, built in Texas in 1992, was created as a direct analogy to Bella Bartók's distinct division between heavy and light in his work Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste. For this project, I made an equation to explain the condition where sound is to time as light is to space:

Bridging music and architecture can form a very unique and dynamic experience of space. For the design of the new Maggie's Centre, currently under construction in the historic center of London, the building's colored glass façade was inspired from neume notation of Medieval chant music of the thirteenth century. A new insulating material, a type of glass never used before, brings wonderful colored light to the inside as visitors experience the building. Music's ancient history and locality was the inspiration for the Huangzhou music museum, a proposal not yet realized. The design concept is based on the idea that each of the museum's eight auditorium volumes relate to one of the Eight Sounds, known as "bayin" (八音), in traditional Chinese music: silk, bamboo, wood, stone, metal, clay, gourd, and hide. Here the materiality of music became a direct reference to the architectural vocabulary.

Research on music and architecture continues to provoke inspiration and is especially needed in the present moment when architectural pedagogy and practice seam diffused, directionless, lacking idea and spirit. I have been teaching the advanced design studio "Architectonics of Music" at Columbia University, School of Architecture over the last ten years, now with Dimitra Tsachrelia. This semester we focus on the work of composer Iannis Xenakis, who was also an engineer, architect, and mathematician who truly connected architecture and music with innovative conceptual strategies. At the studio, we see potential in future architecture as open to experiment as it is connected to spirit. While we ask, "what is architecture"? we also ask, "what is music"?

TESSERACTS OF TIME (2015)

Steven Holl in collaboration with Jessica Lang; directed and choreographed by Jessica Lang. Architectural Director, Dimitra Tsachrelia. Jessica Lang Dance: Clifton Brown, Randy Castillo, Julie Fiorenza, John Harnage, Eve Jacobs, Kana Kimura, Laura Mead, Milan Misko, Jammie Walker.

Both Architecture and dance share a passion for space and light in time. However, they are on opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to time. Architecture is one of the arts of longest duration, while the realization of a dance piece can be a quick process and the work disappears as the performance of it unfolds. Here the two merge. Corresponding to the four seasons, but within a twenty-minute period, my collaboration with choreographer Jessica Lang merges dance and architecture in a compression of time and space. The four sections of the dance correspond to the four types of architecture: (1) Under the ground (2) In the ground (3) On the ground (4) Over the ground.

The first section, UNDER, begins with a slow movement of sunlight coming from above, sweeping across the curved interior spaces of the architecture. The dance physically vibrates in the dark shadows of the stage. Dancers are dressed in black geometric and angular costumes. Their movement is grounded and driven with linear thought to the percussive score Anvil Chorus, by David Lang. For the second section, IN, compressed spatial sequences filled in deep...