The project sent to us by CVDB for the Music and Dance School of Coimbra ranked second in an international competition in 2005.
"Architecture is like petrified music" Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The building is a monolith carved in hardened dark ash concrete that draws a musical score, where different notes, sounds and silences, openings and voids are inscribed.
The voids allow the Academy of Music to open its multiple spaces towards the city.
The Music Academy will provide its community with a great diversity of musical experiences and, at the same time, interaction with the city and offer a wide range of events. The building will host different types of users, the public and musicians and students who have different needs and different rhythms in their way of living the structure. The school proposes itself as a flexible space capable of adapting to the wishes and needs of the program, to achieve multiple objectives, according to the specific character of the activities of the Academy of Music.
The project materializes and builds a program and a space dedicated to teaching and learning music and dance, then to work as if in an open field where different musical and acoustic geographies interact. The auditorium and the cultural spaces that have a more direct relationship with the city are on the ground floor. In the center, an internal square that functions as a grandstand, the heart of the school, where all kinds of events can take place. From this space, a sculpted spiral ramp is the element that leads us to all the other spaces of the project.
