House for Musicians

“As a geometric opening towards the sky, the triangle measures the movement of the stars, the Sun and the Moon.”

“What was originally a monolithic building is articulated by certain geometric strategies and thereby called into question.”

“The necessity of architecture is to celebrate the sacredness.”

“It means that if architecture provides that stage you become aware of your participation in the space, you become an actor.”

Four musicians will live here every year, one in each quadrant. Occasionally, they will meet in the center space and make music together, under the triangular opening to the sky. Music and mathematics and architecture. Rarely has geometry been considered so seriously in architecture, or taken to such poetic lengths. Clarity is not a conclusion, but the threshold to a mystery that is archaic and prophetic, belonging at once to the first questions ever asked, and the last ones that ever can be asked. An epic cycle of time is evoked here, and it both exhilarates and threatens.
How accustomed we are to architecture entertaining us with its novelty, or its richness, or its melodrama! This building challenges us with its sober, still, enigmatic presence. We are discomfited, unprepared. And then, we hear within it the sounds of music being played, crisp, equally clear and abstract, yet elusive, ephemeral….and we understand. This is what philosophers meant by “the dialectic.” This is what the architect, Raimund Abraham, means by “architecture is a collision between ideas and matter.”