Expression of sound

‘How do you talk about acoustics in a meaningful way, that is not just technical?’ asks Harpa concert hall director Svanhildur Konráðsdóttir. ‘What matters is the emotional experience.’ In a way, it’s an obvious take: music’s power is its ability to exhilarate, to transform a passive moment (the act of listening) into something visceral and transcendental.
 
Translating this into a building is a challenge on both conceptual and industrial levels (the extreme nuance in creating a room built for clarity of sound is taxing in itself, stresses Tateo Nakajima, an acoustics and theatre director at Arup) but Harpa, explains Edward Arenius (also of Arup), was designed to echo Iceland’s landscape – the expanses of lava-covered nothingness, an image of both vastness and crystalline clarity.
 
‘It’s a house for music,’ says Andrzej Kosendiak of Wrocław’s National Forum of Music. Timelessness is key: the hall was designed, explains Nakajima, as a vehicle for music both archaic and contemporary (classical or otherwise). How this has been realised across all three projects is explored in this second part of Plane—Site (opens in new tab)’s Scenography of Space series.

Music: Featherlight by Lee Rosevere