House of Hungarian Music

Budapest, Central Hungary, Hungary, 2014

With a profoundly diverse background, Hungary’s musical culture consists of multiple exchanges and overlaps between the spontaneous and the concerted, the impromptu and the choreographed, the passed-on-by-mouth and the notated, all of them cross-influencing and providing access to each other to form a unique musical heritage.

Our proposal for the House of Hungarian Music evolves around a simple gesture generating a complexity of spatial and acoustic experiences:

Five simple volumes —each an acoustic and curatorial platonic optimum—, are rotated and stacked on top of each other. A web of fine threads weaves a membrane around them and opens up a myriad of interstices between.

The project consists of two worlds: The informal zone between external membrane and the core of platonic volumes, and the acoustically perfectly controllable insides of these stacked volumes.

Stacked on top yet separated from each other, the volumes are sound tunnels which can be opened on both ends to let the outside in or the inside be heard outside.

Sounds flow in and out and link the House of Hungarian Music with its surroundings. These formal sound tunnels are cultural cross-sections engaging the visitors in a reconfigurable play of Hungary’s multifaceted history of music.

As the informal weaves around the formal, rhythms and sounds —the acoustic preconditions of music— are given a continuous space of unexpected discoveries.

Not unlike Hungary’s musical culture itself, the House of Hungarian Music is a place where the informal and the formal co-exist in a mutually enriching interdependence. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the more refined seems to ask for a less spontaneous shell.