When an architectural planning student has to spend a few hours hunched over a drafting table, or sitting in front of a monitor to manage his CAD proceedings, you can bet that sooner or later he’ll put on his earphones to listen some music; and we can guess its kind: rock, funky, metal, rap and so on. All normal.
But that kind of music, with simple and repetitive sound structures, seemed to me a missed didactic opportunity, because elementary rhythms, times and sequences could lead those students to create spaces also simple, repetitive and elementary. It would have been useful for them to know and memorize other rhythms and other sequences; other musics, in short, from which they could perhaps draw an inspiration, in the unfathomable processes of creative imagination, to suggest new stimulating spaces on a building and urban level. Topics that I can only shortly mention here, but that have very concrete implications: today, to give a case in point, stimulating perceptions are intentionally applied in the design of shopping malls to suggest and direct people to purchase goods.
I certainly couldn’t put such large topics into my students’ works, but I wanted to try a little experiment anyway. So I brought into the classroom a player and some CDs of music – all strictly classical -, I said the theme of the design to be done, closed firmly the door to suggest ‘no escape’ and pressed the play button.
Thus, during my hours of teaching, some melodious soundtracks and even some warbling spread through the corridors – of course at low volume. My students had Ravel, Sciostakovic, Rossini, Tchaikovsky as assistants.
The janitors looked at me a little puzzled and a little amused, while the boys put up with everything politely, and some even asked about what they had heard. Of course, I didn’t torture them too much: I had chosen songs that were well-known thanks to movies and TV, and were also catchy. However the experiment could go, for me it was like sowing in a ploughed field hoping that something would germinate.
But what?
My experiment started from afar. I used to insert some musical reference in what I told in class despite my total ignorance of musical theories; but if I took these didactic risks it was because I wanted to pass on the message of the existence of an affinity between the composition of architecture and that of music. Architectural spaces and musical spaces propose the creation of perceptive structures that both develop over time, and therefore can have rhythms, sequences, counterpoints, themes, variations. For this reason I thought that in order to teach space design it would be useful to have alongside a Conservatory colleague, in order to provide students with the basics of what is common to the two sides, architectural and musical, leading them to listen critically to selected pieces and then to analyze spaces and projects together.
I left teaching a few years ago, but, as far as I know, it seems to me that in the design subjects we still follow completely different paths, repetitive and flat.
