LABYRINTH AS FROZEN MUSIC

THEORETICAL INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ON MUSIC AND ARCHITECTURE

Place: Intersection of La Petite Ceinture & Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Paris

I believe that different creation fields are complementary and among which covalence exist. My thesis explores on how to reproduce life inherent in the musical form with architectural composition through metaphysical approach. The beauty of music attributes to its high degree of life inherent in its holistic form, which is affective, adaptive and generative. How to capture the essence of music, to reproduce the qualities experienced, and eventually create building as form of frozen music are the focuses of my thesis. The product of my thesis is not only the building design, but the lens and methods adopted in the creation process.

From Research to Design

In the research part, I approach the quote “I call architecture frozen music “by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, studying literatures on mainly based on philosopher Gilles Deleuze, architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa, Christopher Alexander and music theorist Ernst Kurth. The outcome of the research is a coherent conceptual lens capable to explain the subjective phenomenons. To apply the research into design, I made subjective sketches depicting the stories behind a particular event and aimed to turn the event into a frozen piece of music.

Design Articulation

The design part is to counter the shift of architecture experience from existentially plastic and spatial experience, to mere time-compressed striking visual image, with the loss of experiential depth, under the information age. As inversion of Plato’s “allergy of the cave”, my building functions as an immersive labyrinth with ambiguity and mystery hidden beneath ground, descending from a French landscape and affording a retreating experience to urban wildscape explorers. It fulfilled the timeless task of architecture as stated by Pallasmaa – “understand and remember the shapeless flow of reality and, ultimately, to recognize and remember who we are.” The building situates itself in Paris, at the intersection of the abandoned La Petite Ceinture, an urban wildscape experiencing the transition from ruin to regeneration, and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, where the histories of underground mining hidden beneath. The memories of two places intertwined at this counterpoint and synthesize into a frozen melody, as the body of the labyrinth.