Room to listen

Kacper Kępiński

31 of August '22

Room to listen

...

Pianist Hania Rani and designers from the Zmir architecture and craftsmanship studio have created an oasis of tranquility, relaxation and music inside the Zodiak Pavilion. The wooden pavilion builds a special microclimate and shows that there is much more to architecture than external appearance.

Juhani Pallasmaa, a Finnish architect and theorist wrote:

Although architecture has been and continues to be seen as primarily a visual discipline, spaces, places and buildings are perceived as multisensory experiences. Instead of perceiving a building solely as a retinal image, we face it equipped with all our senses and experience it as part of our existential world, not as an object of gaze outside of us.

Visiting, or actually experiencing, the installation created by Hania Rani, Lukasz Palczynski and Jan Szeliga, the thought of Pallasma resonates more strongly. Here, in the Zodiak Pavilion - a building primarily focused on visuality and creating an image that refers to the past, a Listening Room was created - a wooden box for sounds (and the lack thereof).

The Listening Room is a musical and spatial intervention that aims to stimulate discussion on the relationship between architecture and music and the mutual constellations of sound, space and material. In this way, the creators invite the audience to a multi-sensory experience, working with memory and attentive relations with the environment and with others. The room, by the way, affects more senses than just hearing - its wooden matter affects visitors with scent, texture and warmth. The separation from the outside world, thanks to the obscuring windows of the unusually open Zodiac, creates an oasis of calm in the center of a busy city.

As the authors of istnalation note, silence is not the opposite or absence of music.

It is the absence of sound conductors - things, people, water, landscape elements, air particles, architecture. Without matter, we are doomed to the silence of sounds, they become impossible to hear, but also impossible to see, feel, taste, touch and remember.

Designing buildings and shaping places is therefore at the same time designing and shaping acoustic space, taming it, giving sounds quality, color, rhythm.

The exhibition is accompanied by a rich program of accompanying events, including discussions on the interpenetration of architecture and music and a concert in the space of the Listening Room.