Architecture as Music: A personal journey through time and space

Abstract

My journey started in the City of London, where I found a building, the Cheesegrater, that generated harmony, pattern, discord, repetition and silence. It inspired me to produce a piece of Visual Music, Citirama, expressing the relationship between architecture and music. The success of the piece during presentations and performances has now led me to formulate a considered view on how music and architecture can be found to coexist: how our new understanding of the concept of space/time can bring an art form concerned primarily in mapping sound in time closer to a form focused on what we experience in moving through space. From the Cheesegrater, my wanderings led me to a building, in Berlin, where the emotions of music have been conveyed in purely architectural terms and to another structure, in Brussels, which, during its short life, offered a total architectural/musical experience in time and space. I conclude that, over the centuries, Western developments in architecture and music have tended to obscure their common roots in Ancient Greece. Although Pythagorean mathematical links still persist, its through our new 21 st century awareness of how the human brain causes us to see and hear that, once again, architecture and music will be able to sing in unison.