Zaha Hadid's music pavilion for the Manchester international festival is almost complete. The Guardian's Art & Design editor Charlotte Higgins discusses the project with Zaha. Tom Service, music editor, follows up with his thoughts.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond
Zaha Hadid's music pavilion for the Manchester international festival is almost complete. The Guardian's Art & Design editor Charlotte Higgins discusses the project with Zaha. Tom Service, music editor, follows up with his thoughts.
UPDATE: HI-Res Photos of the finished installation on Bustler.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond
Last year, the architect Zaha Hadid was invited to design a space specifically for the performance of solo Bach – a 21st-century version of the kind of salon where the great patrons of the 18th century might have listened to music they had commissioned. Her brief, from the director of the Manchester international festival, Alex Poots, was that the space should come close to creating the perfect conditions for the music to be heard; after all, Bach's exquisite, complex solo partitas and sonatas were originally written for small audiences, to be performed in intimate environments – not giant concert halls.
3 Comments
this is an insult to the music of bach, especially bach performed solo (unless it were done by the schlocksters such as the grinning yo-yo ma). this kind of space is more suited to the likes of kanye west, i.e., throw-away commodities of "music"
No, the space cannot be for Kanye West. There is difference between relating spaces with fashion, versus relating spaces with function.
In terms of fashion, we might have related swooping futuristic forms and rap music under the same umbrella. (Not that I necessarily see that association.)
But in terms of space, there is no way rap music will be played in such a small venue, live. It can be a backdrop for music video. I personally would not want his mouth this close to me in an intimate setting.
That is not to say I think the space is really designed for listening to Bach either.
Photos of the finished installation, as well as 3D models and a report from Mark Howarth, the project's acoustician, on Bustler.
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