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. “Architectonics of Music” is an ongoing series of studios taught at Columbia University on music and architecture. They are part of a larger project to develop cross-disciplinary, inspiration-provoking work on new architectural languages. Taught with architect Dimitra Tsachrelia and composer Raphael Mostel, this studio begins with a four-week experiment translating a music excerpt into space, material and form. In the first half of the studio, six teams of two students select works of 20th-century composers with an eye to the geometric potential of translation to architecture. The second half of the studio focuses on transcribing the language experiments of one case study. The students are then invited to choose from three potential sites for their experiments.
Research into music and architecture moves forward at a time when architecture pedagogy is diffused. Schools of architecture today seem directionless. Postmodernism and deconstruction have passed into history, while the euphoria of technique in “parametrics” promises a lack of idea and spirit, and neglect of the importance of scale, material, detail, proportion and light. “Architectonics of Music” continues to see potential in future architecture as open to experiment and as connected to spirit. While we ask, “What is architecture?” we also ask, “What is music?”