great idea, karim. i hope it becomes more than just setting song and building next to each other with some pithy comments. i certainly think what you're doing has the potential to be more.

what about the effects of built spaces on certain music?
associations with music brought about by occupying a building?
an approach to lyrics that subtly suggests the impt of the designed environment?
the music buildings themselves make?

so many opportunities here. good luck.

amen to both

i would like to take this somewhere abstract, yet real

like patterns, riffs, funky basslines that seem to say the same thing as patterned surfaces on floors/elevations but not the formulaic greg lynn blob crap or morton feldman psycho freakshow

and translating the experience of the music into an attempt at what someone passing through the building would experience based on a similar element like time...spatio-temporal phenomenological bla bla bla

i have been wanting to turn some of my songs into buildings...but it's hard enough to record a song when i have so many ideas!

first you harmonize, then you customize.

"i hope it becomes more than just setting song and building next to each other with some pithy comments" - Steven Ward.

good point--some of Libeskin's interpretations from music into arch are bs, in my opinion, very shallow

I'm currently doing my final independent studio investigating music and architecture...I believe Stephen Holl has had some success in the Guardilio House---although he's not concerned with music, it deals with an arbitrary object in space that is shifted many times in generally orthiginal ways, thus created a manifestation of space derived from the initial object. This is where I find a correlation between music and arch...where the dimension of time comes into play and how space evolves through time...

wasn't holl's stretto house specifically related to music in some way. so long ago i can't really remember...

detroit techno/electro....bangin' them beats

-i couldn't tell you- I do know he's spent time on the subject (parallax book, ofcourse--where he dives into All of the phenomenon that interest him...

- i don't know how i feel about that book, though

of course you have to include the eisenman crit clip on your site..
*put on a straight face*

holl on the stretto house, from a+u:

"a particular piece of music, by bela bartok; composition for strings, percussion and celeste, was a parallel on which the house form was made."

story goes he was inspired by site conditions of water pooling over walls and found aa justification in form that was similar, the stretto.

transposes bartok's work directly to form the ceiling.



i worked on a project where a beethoven symphony was transposed into a shading device for an interesting effect that maybe one person not associated with the project might ever get.

what about the emotive qualities of music and whether architecture can achieve something similar?

i went on an architecture tour of the robie house and this old woman kept going "oooh oh oh oh!" and " wow wow wowowowowow!!!"

and all i could think was shut the feck up. and sometimes when i hear the crappy music my co-worker's play, i'm reminded of that awful awful moment and that one woman that solidified my disdain for wright.

Wow guys this response is all very lucid!

I have to admit that I was coming from a much more 'simple' viewpoint, as I am not a trained architect and haven't studied the theories of building, design and form. Also I was trying to concentrate purely on popular song as that is the form of music I practice. I suppose that it is therefore inevitable that the associations translate into concise and pithy statements.

BUT! The more deeper associations and ideas are very enticing and I am aware of others that have looked into this on a more abstract level.

The Bartok thing is great!

I would be intrigued to see what certain architects or designers would make of taking inspiration or form from Radiohead's 'Kid A' album. Some would say that is an abstract masterpiece in modern popular music.

Cheers,
Karim

if you're seriously interested in this subject, a good place to start is the pamphlet architecture #16 publication, entitled Architecture as a Translation of Music. Many of the topics above are in it, including Holl's essay on the Stretto House.

Another aside that's often mentioned in music/architecture discussions is the philips pavillion by Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, and Edgard Varese. Here again it's another musical piece (--> Varese's Poeme Electronique) translated as a building.

Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste is monumental in its own right not just the architectural interpretation of his work. Bartok not only had perfect pitch but perfect timing. Something like he could tell exactly how long he'd been in conversation with someone, etc. ....and so this piece in the first movement is fundamently symmetrical by use of the golden ration (this division of time/space i believe is basis for the Stretto House). For the music, the climax falls at the exact golden ration division for the entire piece (measure 56 of 88), entrances of instruments come at strategic golden ration divisions within phrases, the harmonies are related to the golden ration, the melodic pitches/rhythms/time signatures/dynamics/chords/key areas (or clusters as their called)/as well.

it's epic.



music, math, art, architecture.

Something to think about.

karim and all,
i infrequently read steve roden's blog airform archives which besides other rareties often comments on his personal or found accounts of architecture, design and music. it seems somewhat along the lines of what you're interested in exploring.

I would be careful about the pamphlet architecture...I do not buy its interpretation of Bartok, nor its translation into a bunch of stacked blocks..