2006

Alexander Skryabin died in 1915 when his music was on the point of abandoning tonality. He was planning a grand performance, music/scent/dance/light that would take place in the Himalayas. His composition Poem of Fire (1910) includes a “clavier à lumières” – an implement that played like a piano but which flooded the concert hall with colored light rather than sound. This experimental studio reactivates research in form, structure and material begun in 1982 at Columbia. In 1988 we designed the Stretto House in Dallas parallel to Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). The site in Budapest is near the birthplace of Béla Bartók. We are working together with the Hungarian architect Tamas Nagy, who is also head of Budapest School of Architecture. The program is a hybrid building. The Bartók Center for Music and Sound, which is about 50,000 sq ft is inserted into the fabric of Budapest. Bartók composed movements of 89 bars according to the Fibonacci sequence “a layering of mismatches”. Steven Holl with Christian Wassmann