{"id":196170,"date":"2022-05-04T09:21:43","date_gmt":"2022-05-04T13:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/?post_type=id_project&p=196170"},"modified":"2022-11-22T09:52:18","modified_gmt":"2022-11-22T14:52:18","slug":"sou-fujimoto-architects-draws-on-the-local-landscape-for-house-of-music-hungary","status":"publish","type":"id_project","link":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/projects\/sou-fujimoto-architects-draws-on-the-local-landscape-for-house-of-music-hungary\/","title":{"rendered":"Sou Fujimoto Architects Draws on the Local Landscape for House of Music, Hungary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\"More
More than 30,000 abstract me\u00adtallic leaves evoking a woodland canopy decorate the ceiling of the lobby and other ground-floor spaces. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n

May 4, 2022<\/p>\n\n\n

Words: <\/span>Joseph Giovannini<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photography: <\/span>Roland Halbe<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n

Sou Fujimoto Architects Draws on the Local Landscape for House of Music, Hungary<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Beethoven would be pleased. The famously outdoorsy composer of the Pastoral Symphony translated nature into sound, so\u2014were he in Budapest today, encountering the House of Music, Hungary\u2014he would understand its translation into architecture. Just completed, the three-story, 97,000-square-foot cultural facility stands amid woodlands in the capital\u2019s 200-hundred-year-old, 300-acre City Park. Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto<\/a> has designed the building like a forest canopy, with more than 30,000 abstract metallic leaves decorating the ceiling of a shallow, organically shaped dome hovering above a 320-seat glass-enclosed concert hall, a smaller auditorium, and an open-air stage. The striking design bested 170 entries in a competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The House of Music, Hungary, a combination performance, exhibition, and educational facility by Sou Fujimoto Architects, sits in Budapest\u2019s historic City Park. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The roof, its underside an airy filigree of gold foliage on a black background, matches the height of the arboreal canopy of the surrounding park, establishing a continuum from real nature outside to built nature inside. \u201cMy interest in architecture is how to integrate natural things and architecture,\u201d Fujimoto<\/a> notes, \u201cnot to mix them, but to translate architecture into nature and nature into architecture.\u201d For centuries, composers have responded to the acoustic properties of concert halls, cathedrals, and other performance spaces. Fujimoto adds nature to the equation: The architecture of music and the music of architecture triangulate off his interpretation of trees in a wood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The glazed walls of the 320-seat concert hall give performers and audiences uninterrupted views of the park.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What makes this metaphor of built nature possible is glass, which distinguishes the House of Music from the type of building that has long hosted Beethoven symphonies. Fujimoto eliminated the opaque walls that have always introverted symphony halls, dematerializing the entire perimeter of the structure with floor-to-ceiling glazing\u201494 custom panels in all, some almost 39 feet tall. Flat glass provides an acoustically unfriendly surface, but Japanese firm Nagata Acoustics, veterans of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, have ensured warm, blended sound by zigzagging the panels. Performers and audiences make and hear music while seeing the enveloping park, the architecture establishing a synesthetic continuum between notes and nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"More
More than 30,000 abstract me\u00adtallic leaves evoking a woodland canopy decorate the ceiling of the lobby and other ground-floor spaces. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe were enchanted by the multitude of trees in the City Park and inspired by the space created by them,\u201d says Fujimoto, who is best known in the West for 2013\u2019s miragelike Serpentine pavilion in London and a 2019 apartment building in Montpellier, France, a treelike structure bristling with white, cantilevered terraces and awnings. \u201cI envisaged the open floor plan, where boundaries between inside and outside blur, as a continuation of the park.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the transparency of the ground floor, park visitors can see through the building to the other side. Even inside, they experience the effect of light filtering through a forest canopy and dappling the ground, thanks to nearly 100 apertures that puncture the roof to serve as light wells. Sound waves inspired the undulating roof, which changes in depth, though always remaining lower than the tree line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"The
The spiral staircase connecting the building\u2019s three levels is rendered in steel above ground. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"Where
Where the spiral stair descends to the basement-level exhibition spaces, it becomes concrete. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"Its
Its sub\u00adterranean corkscrew form acquires the heft of a monumental sculpture. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The simplicity of a canopy floating over an open interior landscape, however, is only apparent. Comprising three levels, the structure is both an iceberg and a tree house: A permanent exhibition on the history of music, galleries for temporary shows, and a hemispherical dome for audio projections occupy the basement; the ground floor houses the performance venues; and, above the leafy ceiling, attic space in the roof accommodates a library, classrooms, archives of Hungarian pop music, and offices. An irresistible, dramatically sculpted spiral staircase connects all floors. In fine weather, performers on the open-air stage play to an audience on bleachers embedded in the adjoining landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A roof aperture, one of nearly 100, allows light to dapple the interior as if it were a forest floor. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe\u2019s famous glass-and-black-steel National Gallery in Berlin established the precedent for a roof hovering over a vast open space with a basement for public functions. Here Mies\u2019s square canopy has been replaced by an organically shaped, decorated form shot through with light. The paradigm has shifted: Nature has replaced the machine, and decoration, the idea of structure. There\u2019s a social shift, too: Transparency allows the public visual access to the inner sanctum, erasing the elitist overtones of a building intended for ticketholders only. Glass helps actualize the goal of a facility invitingly named a \u201chouse,\u201d which is to appeal to a wide spectrum of musical tastes, from pop and folk to jazz and classical. The permanent exhibition downstairs uses interactive technology to tell the story of two millennia of European music. The program is educational and embracing rather than exclusionary, its architecture a teaching instrument. Invoking nature through design ingratiates the institution to a broad audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"On
On the top floor, glass panels turn descending light shafts into radiant vitrines.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"Wooden
Wooden bleachers offer a quiet spot to sit in a corner of the lobby.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The building is the first of several planned for Liget Budapest, a controversial project by the government of Viktor Orban, Hungary\u2019s far-right prime minister, to transform the historic park into a museum district. For all the House of Music\u2019s formal originality, the architect and his team\u2019s design process was conventional: They researched the site, the project\u2019s cultural background, and the whole brief, and then sketched and chatted, eventually arriving at the key concept. \u201cUnderstanding the fundamental relationship between people and people, and people and nature is the core of architecture,\u201d Fujimoto says, concluding on a musical metaphor: \u201cSticking to the budget, sticking to the surroundings, reacting to the requirements\u2014everything is harmonized.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The organic nature of the building\u2019s per\u00adforated roof becomes even more apparent when viewed from above.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"The
The structure\u2019s deep eaves provide shelter for outdoor concerts and recitals, which can be enjoyed from bleachers set into the adjacent landscape.\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Although
Although the floating roof has an undulating form, it nowhere rises above the height of the surrounding treetops.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n