Bartók in Space and Time
Robbrecht en Daem architects
Hannibal Books.
Brussels’ Centre for Fine Arts, known as the Bozar, was designed by Belgium’s most celebrated architect Victor Horta and completed in 1929.
Eight years later, Bela Bartok composed his “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta”.
The two meticulous constructions provided the inspiration for the first in a series known as “Staging the Concert” in the centre’s Henry Le Boeuf hall, named after the banker who funded it, rather than Horta.
A website note tells us the concept of the “Staging the Concert” format, which is ongoing, is simple: an artist is invited to intervene in the music and explore the interplay with “space, light and materials”.
For the first of the series, Ghent architects Robbrecht and Daem gave physical expression to Bela Bartok’s music.
A year on, Hannibal Books have marked the occasion with a book, which also commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Robbrecht and Daem architects.
The architects found they had in common with Bartok a fascination with numbers and embraced the theory he used the Fibonacci sequence in his compositions.
Robbrecht and Daem combine Fibonacci with their own Louie sequence, a numerical system that plays an important role in their work and found that five was a number central to both.
The result was five architectural bodies created to float above the orchestra as Robbrecht and Daem imagined the Henry Le Boeuf concert hall as “a micro-universe, a special cosmos”.
Musicologists tell us Bartok never spoke about his structural composition principles, but you sense he would have appreciated the cerebral approach to creating an objective correlative.
Barbara Lewis.
Bartók in Space and Time
Robbrecht en Daem architects
Hannibal Books.
Brussels’ Centre for Fine Arts, known as the Bozar, was designed by Belgium’s most celebrated architect Victor Horta and completed in 1929.
Eight years later, Bela Bartok composed his “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta”.
The two meticulous constructions provided the inspiration for the first in a series known as “Staging the Concert” in the centre’s Henry Le Boeuf hall, named after the banker who funded it, rather than Horta.
A website note tells us the concept of the “Staging the Concert” format, which is ongoing, is simple: an artist is invited to intervene in the music and explore the interplay with “space, light and materials”.
For the first of the series, Ghent architects Robbrecht and Daem gave physical expression to Bela Bartok’s music.
A year on, Hannibal Books have marked the occasion with a book, which also commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Robbrecht and Daem architects.
The architects found they had in common with Bartok a fascination with numbers and embraced the theory he used the Fibonacci sequence in his compositions.
Robbrecht and Daem combine Fibonacci with their own Louie sequence, a numerical system that plays an important role in their work and found that five was a number central to both.
The result was five architectural bodies created to float above the orchestra as Robbrecht and Daem imagined the Henry Le Boeuf concert hall as “a micro-universe, a special cosmos”.
Musicologists tell us Bartok never spoke about his structural composition principles, but you sense he would have appreciated the cerebral approach to creating an objective correlative.
Barbara Lewis.
By Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, architecture, music • Tags: architecture, Barbara Lewis, music