Architecture is Frozen Music

I want to start this posting with a quote by the philosopher Friedrich Schelling; ” Architecture is frozen music”. He was speaking to what he found to be the solidity of architecture and the intangibility of music. I like this articulation; it parallels the relationship between static architectural form and the fluidity it may infer. I want to see architectural form liberated.

Why not take this frozen music, and bring it to life by an interaction with light. This interplay is like another chorus(?) for a new set of instruments, that of digital light, projections, and image displays. The use of lighting animates architectural from where images emerge. Consider the ‘frame’ of moving images as non-existent; instead, the images grow out of the architectural form, animated by it.

Pictured here is Toyo Ito’s ‘ Tower of the Winds’ it was built in the 1980′s in Yokohama, Japan. It visualized the activity of the wind in its immediate surroundings by translating wind velocities into coloured light. The outside structure was made of perforated steel, and would appear solid from a distance until the lighting within would illuminate its inner structure. I read it as a piece of deconstruction. Since 2007 it has really inspired me in that it gives an urban object, like a tower, a new relevance in the city scape, I think many components of our skyline can do this.