David & Peter Adjaye: Music and Architecture
DS.WRITER:
Tasos Giannakopoulos
When one wants to talk about architecture and music, one must, redundantly at this point, start from Goethe’s aphorism that architecture is music frozen in time. Like all metaphors, this particular one has the power to re-describe reality and locate relations and similarities where there aren’t any. Such is the project put in motion, according to the metaphorical ideal, by architect Sir David Adjaye with his brother and musician Peter Adjaye, aka AJ Kwame- since DJ Peter was taken and not prone to commercial success. The collaboration between the architect and the musicologist, composer, DJ-producer, a mathematician with a PhD and creator of experimental soundscapes, qualities all mentioned in his CV, has been going on for more than a decade, having as the most notable result the album Dialogues.
“What Peter does is ‘sound architecture’. I pass my work onto Peter and ask him to react. Architecture is narration. This artwork is like a DNA experiment. There is a construction. ”
David Adjaye
Dialogues Music for Architecture Cover | thespaces.com
Dialogues | architectmagazine.com
Each track of this album responds to a work by David Adjaye, including the 500 million worth National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., the Stephen Lawrence Centre in Deptford as well as the Genesis Pavilion in Miami, Florida. This attempt is best understood and processed by intuitive means rather than logical one-to-one ratios since architecture and music concern very different fields of practice with different mediums and goals. Like metaphors, it is based on the movement and borrowing of an idea from one thing to a different thing. The work Dialogues attempts to impart the atmosphere and the occasional narration of the architectural parts through music.
National Museum of African History | newyorker.com
Stephen Lawrence Centre| Deptford arts uk
This brings to mind the exceptional Ianni Xenakis and his works, which execute an opposite movement than those of AJ Kwame. Iannis begins from the musical part and is lead to the creation, solution, execution of the architectural work, like in the openings of La Tourette monastery, or in the innovative work Metastasis- which is being played as this text is being written- and which leads to the design of Philips Pavilion for the International EXPO exhibition of 1958 in Brussels.
Xenakis Metastasis Cover
La Tourette | Photo Mary Godin Xenakis
La Touretter Xenakis| justinnicholsarchitects.com
La Tourette Xenakis | divisare.com
Philips Pavillion Expo 58 Iannis Xenakis | wikipedia.com
In both works, even if quality-wise they are far apart, I think there is a rhythmanalytic attitude or starting point, as described by Henri Lefebvre in 1992- a reference which also demonstrates the innovative dynamics of Iannis. There is, namely, a rhythmanalytic attitude of facing the world, and to continue the metaphor game, an attitude of cutting horizontally the rhythms produced by the world. This is an attitude that locates similarities between things, because it does not examine the internal relations which guide and produce mainly differences between things, but is more interested in the consonance amongst their internal rhythms. These attempts at translating or examining a form through another one, while lacking in precision, are a basic human function of communication. They combine, in a more or less comprehensible whole, experiences of our lived life and allow us to expand our discourse - so much internally with ourselves as much as with our surroundings.
