Offsite:
See plans to turn a
Mies building into a musical instrument.
Illinois Institute of Technology's Crown Hall--the big Mies
van der Rohe glass box that serves as the college of
architecture's "one-room schoolhouse"--sang for
the first time this May. As part of the school's annual open
house (an event that has previously involved such
extravagant gestures as carpeting the building in Kentucky
bluegrass) an experimental music group called the MASS
Ensemble transformed the building into a giant stringed
instrument.
"We attach high-polish brass wire to the architecture
in a manner that really interprets its lines," says
Bill Close, the MASS Ensemble member who designed the
instrument, which involved some 24,000 feet of wire.
"The instrument is tuned to the building, so the
vibrations of the strings are transferred directly into the
steel-truss structure of Crown Hall. The building is
literally in a state of vibration."
Architect Mark Schendel, principal of the firm Studio
Gang/O'Donnell (and formerly of Rem Koolhaas's Office for
Metropolitan Architecture), led a team of IIT architecture
students in the design and realization of the open house.
"Crown Hall, being the monument that it is, has been
scrutinized and analyzed in every way--its material, its
proportions, its relation to the Modernist movement--but it
has never before been acoustically or harmonically
analyzed," he says.
