courtesy Saucier + Perrotte Architects
A few years ago there was an international competition for the Cantos Foundation’s National Music Centre in Calgary. The Saucier + Perrotte proposal was not chosen, but a file of marvellous drawings came my way for a different project on unbuilt and unrealised ideas. Because I know Calgary, and because I’m not particularly interested in the politics or names of superstardom in architecture, I looked at the drawings for this project as drawings , eloquent diagrams of architectural intent. Without reading all the explanatory texts that came with the proposal, I looked at the drawings and saw wind. Part of Saucier + Perrotte’s narrative reads: The National Music Centre’s skin provides a manifestation in three- dimensional terms of the sounds represented by the music we hear. … Since the generational organisation of musical sequences is similar to the harmonic overtones generated by a vibrating string, facade patterns are based on a family of lines according to a musical sequence. This family is then rotated around a central point to create a two-dimensional pattern. By accenting certain families of lines, a hierarchy is established in the pattern, which begins to define the important nodes. These nodes are the basis of a structural diagram that relates to the lighter glazing pattern. When a three-dimensional aperiodic pattern is created, it is possible to relate the boundaries of certain solids to families of planes organised along musical sequences. This can create interesting offset options, as the pattern on the boundary of the solid will be mirrored, but slightly altered, in the offset plane. The resulting 2D and 3D (or multi-dimen- sioned) grids are non-repeatable, ensuring regular nosing-out proper- ties despite the irregular pattern. For purposes of exhibition, the exterior skin is always left intact, but the interior skin changes in opacity depending on the nature of the objects/artefacts displayed. This is what results in the changing nature of the facades, from clear to smoky in appearance as perceived from the outside. In fact, the exterior envelope’s colours appear different as one moves around the building. The west facade appears white, but as observed from 9th Avenue SE the south facade is gray. As one sees the building from the east, the east facade appears very dark or even black. This perceptual dynamic ensures that, just as music and sound do not remain static, the National Music Centre is ever-changing in appear- ance. Well, I hardly understand this at all, but I do get that the appearance of this building will be ephemeral, ambiguous, motile. If one could imagine a building blowing down 9th Avenue as if it were a silver sheet of water, this is it. Alas, we shall not see such a thing. The music centre we are getting looks like an organ with gilded pipes at the top.
More from Saucier + Perrotte: …the atrium…based on notions of echo, delay, reverberation, [is] a space that can be mechanically modified to alter sound and perception. This large chamber reacts to any sound input (human or instrumental sounds, using microphones or with electronic input) and is able to manipulate these sounds. This element becomes the central structuring node for the overall project …visitors remain cognisant of their position with respect to this resonant object…experiencing different sounds or sets of sounds as the input is constantly changing. This brings to mind Martyn Ware’s 2012 Tales from a Bridge , sound loops coming from all directions in ever-changing syncopation. The Music Centre’s resonant object is an atrium, skylit, bouncing sound and light around within it with lesser and greater control. It is the glass core of the project, all tilting walls and walkways: a disturbing collage of sound files and an equally disturbing collage of reflectant surfaces. There was a program for this project, of course: studios, sound stages, the museum: Cantos’s extensive, historic, interactive musical instrument collection; there is Elton John’s white 1910 piano and the Rolling Stones’ 2001 Mobile Studio — there is stuff in this centre, not just space. And we know that the building cannot actually be ephemeral, ambiguous, motile, it can only hope to encourage such a reading. What I quite like is that the appearance on the street, in its urban context, does not shout out ‘music lives here’, rather it transcends program, the renewal of east downtown Calgary and the accommodation of the indigestible 1910 King Edward Hotel which must remain on the site, and instead captures some near-indefinable but lyrical characteristics of Calgary – the transformational Chinook winds that blow over the mountains from the Pacific Ocean a thousand kilometres away, the sound of the trains across the street on the main line that stretches from Halifax to Vancouver: thin, attenuated, a sound a continent wide. Saucier + Perrotte’s particular tilting folded-plate form-making suits this very well. There is no immediate urban context to respond to – well there is, but it is ghastly. The context here is geographic and environmental, not ephemeral at all. Thinking about an architecture that addresses sound, it doesn’t have to be the sound of our civilisation, its music, its mechanical noise, its bellowing spatial control. It can be something much more fundamental – the sound of our place on the earth. j
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