I Have been thinking about architecture allot over the last few months. I haven't been working as I have been ill; something I have been good at over the years. For the first time in my career I have been following the work/ideology of OMA; a very popular topic. As I am also a lover of classical music I see parallel's between this kind 'hyper rationalism' of OMA and the musical composition of Bach; the fugue and architecture. Beauty expressed as a series of overlapping logical lines never resolving and re-inventing...
i think its a topic that frenquently comes up, although few studies have crossed my path. However i remember an issue of arch. record where a building was designed around literral extrusions of sound waves
bach was intrigued with the rationalism of the day. but, he was no rationalist. he was just as much a mystic. oma maybe hyperrational, but, unless you consider supergraphics mystical, they employ none of the alchemystical qualities of bach. and yes, twitty neumann and bach were contemporaries.
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FAKRpUCYY]TheMuSic{/url] that was playing in the Chicago Architecture Foundation Lobby while people milled around and pointed at the model of OMA's IIT project after attending some hamfisted presentation by an OMA staffer and the Dean of IIT's architecture program. The irony was unintentional
I guess what I am referring to is the more explicate means of 'composition' or 'arranging'. I am not really interested in sound itself, that is another topic altogether.
What interests me is the way creative activity, exclusively architecture and music, organize themselves. I am referring to the classical idiom because of its breadth of structural forms: fugal, classical, romantic, atonal and dissonant.
I mention OMA and Bach because I find there to be an interesting comparison between the two in terms of how they organise there compositions.
hyper-rational seems like a hyper-rationalization made for media > a spin strategy to allow the designers to make heroic and exotic proposals without admitting it.
i don't think this is exactly what bach did. while he may have understood rational, i doubt he would have ever heard of the hyper-, as this is a soon-to-be-empty prefix that we've been decoratively tagging onto words only since the 20th c.
but bach has gotten some good press over the years, so he must have understood p.r., too.
bach's music is not classical but baroque. if you really want to get serious...
of course the classical forms are an evolution of baroque period music, but there is must be a reason why one is called classical and the other baroque.
personally, i don't see the connection between oma and bach's music...unless its the same sort of associative connection between a potato and an ant-eater (they are both historically existing things, their forms are composites of curvilinear surfaced...etc). and i won't pretend to understand what 'hyper-rationality' is and why any form of rationality warrants a wothwhile mention of similarity. reason cannot be construed as a characteristic-in-common since reason itself is what determines what is in-common and not.
what is the connection between 'the art of fugue' and the cctv building ? a deferring variation within the atemporally self-similair? i can afford more de rigeur rhetoric.
bach's music is not classical but baroque. if you really want to get serious...
of course the classical forms are an evolution of baroque period music, but there is must be a reason why one is called classical and the other baroque.
personally, i don't see the connection between oma and bach's music...unless its the same sort of associative connection between a potato and an ant-eater (they are both historically existing things, their forms are composites of curvilinear surfaced...etc). and i won't pretend to understand what 'hyper-rationality' is and why any form of rationality warrants a wothwhile mention of similarity. reason cannot be construed as a characteristic-in-common since reason itself is what determines what is in-common and not.
what is the connection between 'the art of fugue' and the cctv building ? a deferring variation within the atemporally self-similair? i can afford more de rigeur rhetoric.
Yes, Schnittke would be a good comparison. Schoenberg would be another good one.
"hyper-rational seems like a hyper-rationalization made for media > a spin strategy to allow the designers to make heroic and exotic proposals without admitting it."
I also agree with this. I find that their theories are somehow exempt from the actual built form. I guess this is why they built AMO? Much like Wagner's own realization, after reading Schopenhauer, that his theory on composition was ineffective.
Delacroix on Chopin:
"During the day he talked music with me and that gave him new animation. I asked him what establishes logic in music. He made me feel what counterpoint and harmony are; how the fugue is like pure logic in music, and that to know fugue deeply is to be acquainted with all reason and consistency in music."
OMA's 'hyper-rationalism' or organizational structures (so they state) imply the removal of beauty and return to first principles similar to Bach's Well Tempered Clavier: a series of preludes and fugues displaying the qualities of all 24 key signatures. These works along with The Art of the Fugue are profound.
I am not suggesting for one minute that Bach employed rationalism, hyper rationalism or whatever to compose his music, just trying to throw a few ideas into the pot. Don't take my comments too literally. What I am trying to get at is the idea of beauty. Architects such as Hadid, Morphosis, Gehry et.al seem to be the apotheosis to OMA much like romanticism and modernism is in music.
another parallel, Bach was a master in not only the theory and technical composition as he as a master of melody and emotion...i always feel hope and grace when i listen to bach and at the same time, the intricacy and control over his music show his technical knowledge...that balance i think is fundamental in architecture, and perhaps he exemplifies it best (as a composer)
ogden...that was great (i am a fan of bach in a "goldberg" variations kick right now)...but when you hear that, i really have a hard time linking any of it to OMA in particular...
vado...i have a client that sounds just like jack...(what do you mean you need 2 exits?) /// also, in re. to the video, i love how more and more often rules overwrite common sense...
oh, and on a side note...why do so many architects enjoy beethoven!? i have a feeling his passion and rage serve as a release from some of our professional "restraints", no!?
"I chose ARRIS in 1987 because it was the only CAD software with fully intergated 2d and 3d drawing on a PC. I still use ARRIS because I can play it like a concert piano. [What can I say, we all have limited talents.]"
--2004.11.24
Now where's that little video of abracadabra at the computer?
rules...that scene really reflects the here and now doesn't it.
It was never my intension to compare them directly in terms of what they produce but more of a technical commentary on the structure of music and architecture.
Glen Gould. He dedicated most of his adult life to Bach. There is a doco on him on youtube.
I don't know about Bach, but Bruce Goff was really into music and was much influenced by Claude DeBussy. He actually developed some roll sheets of music which could be put on a player piano which were based upon the visual quality of the holes in the paper. They are part of the Bruce Goff Archive at the Chicago Art Institute. A few years ago at an retrospective of his work the music was included in the exhibit.
Other almost architects who ventured away from Architecture
John Denver....University of Arizona
Bryan Burns....Talking Heads.....Rhode Island School of Design
my girlfriend played some very nice Bach cello suites for me in the very poor architectural space of a college music building. Bach and (bad) architecture.
to draw comparison with architecture and bach, firstly i suppose u find the commutable terms to construct ur thoughts... rationalist/hyper-rationalist are very fake terms mostly used by architects, not sure if musicans are into such concepts.
"bach composition push human ambidextrous capacity to its limit for its performance."
sounds like death metal
by dammson
Good point, there were studies of water crystalization process by transfering different music into sonic vibrations, while many types of music form pretty crystal pattern, only the heavy metal and a few bach couldn't form any crystal pattern,
imo - the key is to find the commonality...
_music is a composition in time
_the way the passage of time is coreographed in architecture can be controlled/designed
so
think about bach's strategy for developing a composition and see if you can make those concepts work spatially - maybe the way light comes into a space really transforms throughout the day? you'll have to really focus on solar orientation, etc, as well as other temporal events that happen on your site or 'site'...
ogden, i'm also interested in exploring the link between bach composition and architectural composition mostly through the kind of visual movement obtained through video montage. incidentally, i've made a video associating bach counterpoint and the seattle public library: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNC7yjNnvI
Bach and architecture
lets get serious....
which bach?
Is a Bach like a Boston BArch?
yeah, i've got your bach...right here:
you mean like balthazar neumann serious?
i'm sure I've seen this thread before - perhaps on archinect v.1.4 or something
Let me clarify
J.S Bach, composition and architecture. I interested if any of you twits have anything to say about music and architecture.
In NZ there is already a well-developed architectural discourse on the bach.
bach composition push human ambidextrous capacity to its limit for its performance. the numeric series are also infinite loops.
i'm still hoping to see some architecture space that refine human perceptive capacity or being in a infinite space.
i think we did those graphically in the klien bottle/fractal alike design, but haven't seen anything in real.
typo> redefine human sensitivity.
well twitty, neumann was a contemporary of bach. and let me clarify you haven't added a goddamned thing to your own thread topic.
I met Bach once. He said to give a shout out to all the archinects out there.
Just stirring....
Neumann a contemporary of Bach??
I Have been thinking about architecture allot over the last few months. I haven't been working as I have been ill; something I have been good at over the years. For the first time in my career I have been following the work/ideology of OMA; a very popular topic. As I am also a lover of classical music I see parallel's between this kind 'hyper rationalism' of OMA and the musical composition of Bach; the fugue and architecture. Beauty expressed as a series of overlapping logical lines never resolving and re-inventing...
why is it considered to be bad form to be intellectual? how cheapening to be always clever and cynical.
sounds like death metal
best Bach album!
Does anybody know of any particular studies done that explore musical composition and architecture??
i think its a topic that frenquently comes up, although few studies have crossed my path. However i remember an issue of arch. record where a building was designed around literral extrusions of sound waves
bach was intrigued with the rationalism of the day. but, he was no rationalist. he was just as much a mystic. oma maybe hyperrational, but, unless you consider supergraphics mystical, they employ none of the alchemystical qualities of bach. and yes, twitty neumann and bach were contemporaries.
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FAKRpUCYY]TheMuSic{/url] that was playing in the Chicago Architecture Foundation Lobby while people milled around and pointed at the model of OMA's IIT project after attending some hamfisted presentation by an OMA staffer and the Dean of IIT's architecture program. The irony was unintentional
I guess what I am referring to is the more explicate means of 'composition' or 'arranging'. I am not really interested in sound itself, that is another topic altogether.
What interests me is the way creative activity, exclusively architecture and music, organize themselves. I am referring to the classical idiom because of its breadth of structural forms: fugal, classical, romantic, atonal and dissonant.
I mention OMA and Bach because I find there to be an interesting comparison between the two in terms of how they organise there compositions.
well you haven't compared interestingly or uninterestingly twitty.
Isn't OMA more "polystylistic", similar to Alfred Schnittke?
hyper-rational seems like a hyper-rationalization made for media > a spin strategy to allow the designers to make heroic and exotic proposals without admitting it.
i don't think this is exactly what bach did. while he may have understood rational, i doubt he would have ever heard of the hyper-, as this is a soon-to-be-empty prefix that we've been decoratively tagging onto words only since the 20th c.
but bach has gotten some good press over the years, so he must have understood p.r., too.
bach's music is not classical but baroque. if you really want to get serious...
of course the classical forms are an evolution of baroque period music, but there is must be a reason why one is called classical and the other baroque.
personally, i don't see the connection between oma and bach's music...unless its the same sort of associative connection between a potato and an ant-eater (they are both historically existing things, their forms are composites of curvilinear surfaced...etc). and i won't pretend to understand what 'hyper-rationality' is and why any form of rationality warrants a wothwhile mention of similarity. reason cannot be construed as a characteristic-in-common since reason itself is what determines what is in-common and not.
what is the connection between 'the art of fugue' and the cctv building ? a deferring variation within the atemporally self-similair? i can afford more de rigeur rhetoric.
bach's music is not classical but baroque. if you really want to get serious...
of course the classical forms are an evolution of baroque period music, but there is must be a reason why one is called classical and the other baroque.
personally, i don't see the connection between oma and bach's music...unless its the same sort of associative connection between a potato and an ant-eater (they are both historically existing things, their forms are composites of curvilinear surfaced...etc). and i won't pretend to understand what 'hyper-rationality' is and why any form of rationality warrants a wothwhile mention of similarity. reason cannot be construed as a characteristic-in-common since reason itself is what determines what is in-common and not.
what is the connection between 'the art of fugue' and the cctv building ? a deferring variation within the atemporally self-similair? i can afford more de rigeur rhetoric.
Yes, Schnittke would be a good comparison. Schoenberg would be another good one.
"hyper-rational seems like a hyper-rationalization made for media > a spin strategy to allow the designers to make heroic and exotic proposals without admitting it."
I also agree with this. I find that their theories are somehow exempt from the actual built form. I guess this is why they built AMO? Much like Wagner's own realization, after reading Schopenhauer, that his theory on composition was ineffective.
Delacroix on Chopin:
"During the day he talked music with me and that gave him new animation. I asked him what establishes logic in music. He made me feel what counterpoint and harmony are; how the fugue is like pure logic in music, and that to know fugue deeply is to be acquainted with all reason and consistency in music."
OMA's 'hyper-rationalism' or organizational structures (so they state) imply the removal of beauty and return to first principles similar to Bach's Well Tempered Clavier: a series of preludes and fugues displaying the qualities of all 24 key signatures. These works along with The Art of the Fugue are profound.
I am not suggesting for one minute that Bach employed rationalism, hyper rationalism or whatever to compose his music, just trying to throw a few ideas into the pot. Don't take my comments too literally. What I am trying to get at is the idea of beauty. Architects such as Hadid, Morphosis, Gehry et.al seem to be the apotheosis to OMA much like romanticism and modernism is in music.
I think OMA’s graphics are not super at all.
twitty
I refer to 'classical music' not the classical period. Thanks for the clarification noctilucent
another parallel, Bach was a master in not only the theory and technical composition as he as a master of melody and emotion...i always feel hope and grace when i listen to bach and at the same time, the intricacy and control over his music show his technical knowledge...that balance i think is fundamental in architecture, and perhaps he exemplifies it best (as a composer)
hear this aria: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcXXkcZ2jWM
ps. imho, any links to OMA and Bach to be a stretch...
actually this is a better anology of music and architecture from FiVeEaSyPiEcEs!
Bach is my idol.
Sokolov....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB0gG1E_aS0
some just don't get it.....
ogden...that was great (i am a fan of bach in a "goldberg" variations kick right now)...but when you hear that, i really have a hard time linking any of it to OMA in particular...
vado...i have a client that sounds just like jack...(what do you mean you need 2 exits?) /// also, in re. to the video, i love how more and more often rules overwrite common sense...
oh, and on a side note...why do so many architects enjoy beethoven!? i have a feeling his passion and rage serve as a release from some of our professional "restraints", no!?
"I chose ARRIS in 1987 because it was the only CAD software with fully intergated 2d and 3d drawing on a PC. I still use ARRIS because I can play it like a concert piano. [What can I say, we all have limited talents.]"
--2004.11.24
Now where's that little video of abracadabra at the computer?
those guys wrote some excellent ringtones!
rules...that scene really reflects the here and now doesn't it.
It was never my intension to compare them directly in terms of what they produce but more of a technical commentary on the structure of music and architecture.
Glen Gould. He dedicated most of his adult life to Bach. There is a doco on him on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2EQmQUXXIc
doco
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jiuw44HHb4g
do you think that we don't know who glen gould was? where's my overcoat?
check this out....music animation machine!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvUepMa31o&mode=related&search=
How the f*ck would I know what you know. Just get into it you tossa!
I don't know about Bach, but Bruce Goff was really into music and was much influenced by Claude DeBussy. He actually developed some roll sheets of music which could be put on a player piano which were based upon the visual quality of the holes in the paper. They are part of the Bruce Goff Archive at the Chicago Art Institute. A few years ago at an retrospective of his work the music was included in the exhibit.
Other almost architects who ventured away from Architecture
John Denver....University of Arizona
Bryan Burns....Talking Heads.....Rhode Island School of Design
my girlfriend played some very nice Bach cello suites for me in the very poor architectural space of a college music building. Bach and (bad) architecture.
to draw comparison with architecture and bach, firstly i suppose u find the commutable terms to construct ur thoughts... rationalist/hyper-rationalist are very fake terms mostly used by architects, not sure if musicans are into such concepts.
"bach composition push human ambidextrous capacity to its limit for its performance."
sounds like death metal
by dammson
Good point, there were studies of water crystalization process by transfering different music into sonic vibrations, while many types of music form pretty crystal pattern, only the heavy metal and a few bach couldn't form any crystal pattern,
well i assume most probably are those harpsichord works...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btZyjlP4c9s
too fast may be?
imo - the key is to find the commonality...
_music is a composition in time
_the way the passage of time is coreographed in architecture can be controlled/designed
so
think about bach's strategy for developing a composition and see if you can make those concepts work spatially - maybe the way light comes into a space really transforms throughout the day? you'll have to really focus on solar orientation, etc, as well as other temporal events that happen on your site or 'site'...
i mentioned beethoven above, and a piece came to mind...i think this is why architects like beethoven...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpZgzckMWOI
oh, and as in any other beethoven, you should listen to it very loudly...
give me madam butterfly any day!!
Is there here the suggestion that OMA (unwittingly?) hypre-reenacts Barock musik composition?
see the "Patent Office" within Content:
"Social Condenser" (1982)
"Strategy of the Void I" (planning) (1987)
"Timed Erasures" (1991)
"Loop-Trick" (1987)
"Strategy of the Void II" (building) (1989)
"Stacked Freedoms" (1989)
"Inside-Outside City" (1993)
"Disconnect" (1994)
"Everywhere and Nowhere" (1994)
Variable-Speed Museum" 1995)
"Inert Modified" (1997)
Tall & Slender (1996)
Skyscraper Loop (2002)
"Cake-Tin Architecture" (2002)
"End of the Road" (2003)
Do these design "patents" pass the Baroque Pregnancy test?
Result: will a future building look like this?
ogden, i'm also interested in exploring the link between bach composition and architectural composition mostly through the kind of visual movement obtained through video montage. incidentally, i've made a video associating bach counterpoint and the seattle public library:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNC7yjNnvI
...
...but really it was more impromptu disco dancing in the full screen video lounge...
...and Liquid Sky is a new thing?
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