As music is temporal and ephemeral, so is the International Jazz Festival in Montreal: an event that occurs once a year and attracts many visitors to experience the diverse talent of jazz around the world. As one experiences the jazz, how can the architecture of the event, i.e., the temporary structures that are placed in the site around Place Des Arts, further reinforce the idea of music and improvisation in this space where it is like a piece of music. The space itself has a particular duration of existence and yet repeated in the same manner season after season?
A building type that will expand to accommodate the music festival; it can transform and ‘improvise’ the space around it as well as nearby areas (i.e. the streets that are closed off for performances). It could also provide a year round center for the office of the Jazz festival in addition to being a center for the history of jazz and musical training in jazz. Can the improvisation of music (especially in the form of jazz) be applied to this structure as well as to the urban space to redefine the existing context for a moment?
Because this building will have different components to it, the main building will sit across from the Place Des Arts Metro on the intersection of Jeanne Mance and Maisonneuve. The full extent of this structure will occur when the jazz festival happens in the summer, when the street of Jeanne Mance (between Maisonneuve and St. Catherine’s) is sealed off for performances hopefully, in an attempt to animate the space as a direct correlation to the music that is being performed.
Precedent Studies:
Experience Music Project by Frank Gehry (1995-2000)
This project is located in the downtown core of Seattle, Washington beneath
the famous Space Needle. The reason for looking at this precedent was to
see how the architect attempts to communicate the idea of music to the visitor,
more specifically the idea of rock music. However, Gehry takes a more abstract
way of interpreting rock and roll through the physicality of the instrument.
Borromini’s San Carlo Alle Quattro Fontane
This project will serve as a study on the musical forms that Borromini experiments
with and how he applies them to an urban space in Rome.
thesis
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