THERE IS MUSIC IN EVERY BUILDING
SEPTEMBER 2019
Back in March, I was lucky enough to take part in the annual TEDxCambridgeUniversity conference as one of the 14 speakers. Whilst daunting, this presented a wonderful opportunity to explore and develop my personal interest in architecture and music and how they might interrelate.
I am passionate about both subjects and have long since had a hunch that they are linked. This notion centred around the idea that both architecture and music are composed of layers. On further investigation, numerous parallels became apparent despite the fundamental difference that architecture is visual, physical, and music is aural, intangible.
They share common language – structure, rhythm, harmony, texture, form and so on.
They are both compositions. Architectural composition is the arrangement of building components in space, sensed with our eyes. Musical composition is the arrangement of sounds in time, sensed with our ears.
Architecture is given its distinctive quality or character through choice of materials – stone, brick, timber, glass and so on. The musical equivalent is the range of instruments and sounds available to a composer – piano, strings, brass, percussion for example.
Architectural drawings are like sheet music, one instructing builders on how to construct a building and the other instructing musicians on how to perform a piece of music. In this way, a busy building site resembles an orchestra.
In considering the relationship, one can’t go too far without referencing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous 18th century quote that “Architecture is frozen music”. This suggests solidifying, giving physical presence to sounds and led me to another line of questioning – can we translate the visual, physical, spatial components of architecture into the aural, intangible, time-based components of music? Can we look at a building and hear its music?
To help find answers, I contacted my brother – an electronic music producer – and we agreed to work together on a musical representation of a façade designed by this office – West Court for Jesus College Cambridge. It lends itself well to the test as there is a clear rhythm and well-defined order to the visual composition.
We considered each bay of the façade as a bar in the music with each layer of the façade translated into a different musical component. Repetitive structural brick piers were translated to a beat. The stone fins added to the rhythm as another layer of percussion. The first floor windows were represented as piano chords, setting the groove and reinforcing the meter of the composition. The two floors above were translated into layers of melody, and the hidden foundations dictated the bassline.
The exercise was intended to be diagrammatic. My brother had many ideas about how to make a better piece of music but for me, the legibility of the translation was key. We could have pushed it further, giving more thought to which sounds or instruments might be best suited to different materials for example.
A lot has been written about the links between Classical architecture and music but I am more interested in the here and now. We are in a technological revolution. With the introduction of computers as a compositional tool over the last few decades, I think it is more apparent than ever that both contemporary architecture and music involve the organised, now computer-aided repetition of a series of components.
Today the primary instrumental music is Electronic. It is generally composed on a computer and it is this computer that “performs” the piece, creating the final “recording”. It is still the case that most buildings today are built, or at least put together, by hand, but change is afoot. The use of 3D printing, drones and even robots on building sites hints at a future in which computers replace humans as the “performers” in construction.
If we think about the classical music of the past in terms of the classical buildings of the past, we can align its melodies and orchestration with ornament, craft, organic sculptural form. Contemporary architecture is closer to electronic music. For some this will have negative connotations but it is important to recognize the full spectrum, from the mundanity of elevator music (or Muzak), to the ubiquity of pop music, and on to the progressive sounds of electro, house, techno and so on. As computers continue to have more impact on the way we practice, architects must embrace their potential in the same way music producers have, striving to be more Techno than Muzak.
To view the talk please click here.
THE RED HOUSE
JULY 2014
A group of us from the office recently went to visit William Morris’ Red House. I was inspired by a picture of a red house on the cover of Peter Davey’s book ‘Arts and Crafts Architecture’ so was slightly disappointed to find that those fine chimneys were the work of Edwin Lutyens and not Philip Webb. It was an interesting trip none the less.
The Red House was designed in 1859 by Philip Webb for William Morris. The two had met in the office of G.E. Street in 1856 during Morris’ brief architectural career. The house can be thought of as a bridge between the ‘Gothic Revival’ as epitomised by the ideals of Pugin and the ‘Arts and Crafts’. 50 years after its construction Lawrence Weaver wrote about The Red House ‘It stands for a new epoch of new ideals and practices. Though the French strain which touched so much of the work of the Gothic Revivalists is not absent, and the Gothic flavour itself is rather marked, every brick in it is a word in the history of modern architecture’.1
The Red House is something of an experiment, built by a young and relatively inexperienced architect, and as such is not a refined piece of architecture. Webb later remarked with reference to The Red House ‘…no architect ought to be allowed to build a house until he was 40’. 2
Despite Webb’s young age the experimental feel of the building is probably more to do with the client. Morris would have been incredibly ambitious and perhaps a little impractical. As our tour guide explained the principal rooms of the building face North to address ‘The Pilgrim’s Way’, an ancient route from Winchester to Canterbury as mentioned in Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’. Our guide took great glee in explaining that this eccentricity led to the building being terribly cold, an example of Morris’ ideas overruling common sense. Peter Davey offers a simpler explanation in that Webb was following the Georgian fashion of the principle rooms facing North, whilst also allowing space for the connection of a future East wing for Morris’ friend Edward Burne-Jones and his wife Georgiana.3
To say that the Red House is unrefined, however, is to miss the point of what makes it so significant. It is the physical embodiment of a group of young designers and thinkers who went on to change the face of British art, design and architecture. They were inspired by a nostalgia of a reimagined medieval England, and it was in the past that they found the clues to pave the way for the Arts and Crafts.
This interest in an older England was not unique to Morris as Ian Hislop explains in his recently broadcast BB2 series ‘Ian Hislop’s Olden Days’, which places Morris’ aesthetic interest in the medieval into a broader social and political context. The description of the second episode, ‘Forward into the Past’ is as follows:
Forward into the Past – How the Victorians turned to the Middle Ages to make sense of their era of progress.
‘Ian Hislop travels back to the era of the Industrial Revolution and Victorian Britain. This was a time of some of the greatest progress and modernisation the country had ever seen – and yet, throughout these decades, writers, artists and politicians were trying to make sense of this new world by retreating into a very old world indeed: the Middle Ages.’
The point that Hislop makes is that we take comfort from the cultural signals that remind us of ‘the good old days’ weather they be the idea of chivalry, the Robin Hood politics of ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’ or the truth and beauty inherent in a gothic arch. For the Victorians the golden age was the medieval period so I wonder what it could be for us today.
In architecture we often talk about truth to materials and the expression of a building being honest to its construction. These ideas were central to the thinking of Morris and Webb’s predecessor, A.W.N. Pugin. In his book ‘The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture’ he writes:
‘The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a building that are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of the essential construction of the building. The neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time.’
These words seem as relevant today as they were when first written, although our mental picture on reading them may be somewhat different. Perhaps Pugin’s time and the generation that followed could be thought of as an architectural golden age. In architecture school the Victorian period is an interesting piece of history but not relevant to modern design, but might it be ok to take some inspiration from these great designers?
The idea of any given moment in time looking back to a golden age reminds me of the plot of Woody Allen’s film ‘Midnight in Paris’ which Wikipedia notes ‘The movie explores themes of nostalgia and modernism’
Gil Pender travels back to his Golden age, 1920’s Paris where he socialises with the likes of Hemmingway and falls in love with the beautiful Adriana. All’s well until they are transported back to Adriana’s golden age, the 1890s Belle Époque and Pender realises that a golden age can only ever exist in the past.
If time travel were possible we would only ever be chasing rainbows.
When we build in an historic environment or we are looking to create a sense of place we turn to local materials and traditional construction techniques. These offer us a connection with the past that is important for reasons that I can’t begin to explain but which I acknowledge as being real and significant.
It seems to be becoming increasingly acceptable within contemporary architecture to address issues of nostalgia and modernism but our recent brush with post-modernism has made us cautious in our approach. As we venture once more in this direction we would do well to remember the lessons of Pugin, Allen and Hislop.
1. Weaver, Lawrence Small Country Houses of Today, First Series, Country Life, London, nd, p180.
2. Jack, George ‘An appreciation of Philip Webb’, The Architectural Review, Vol XXXVIII, 1915, p3.
3. Davey, Peter Arts and Crafts Architecture, Phaidon, 2010, p40.
Tom studied at the University of Manchester where he received a BA (Hons) and a diploma with Distinction at the Glasgow School of Art. He won the Royal Scottish Academy Student Prize for Architecture in 2006 as well as the Glasgow City Council Silver Medal, Glasgow School of Art Chairman’s Medal and Glasgow Institute of Architects’ Parchment. Between 2006 and 2013 he worked for Duggan Morris Architects and Rick Mather Architects. Tom joined Niall McLaughlin in 2014 and has been working on a private house in Hampshire and is currently running the Jesus College project for the master plan and first phase of development to add research, social, academic and residential accommodation to the College facilities.