Music and Dance School, Coimbra

“Architecture is like petrified music” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The building is a monolith sculptured in hardened dark ash concrete that draws a musical score, where the diverse notes, sounds and silences, openings and voids are inscribed. The sculptured voids allow the Music Academy to open its multiple spaces to the city.

Architecture and music share between each other various qualities such as the multiplicity of their rhythms. Both are can be a manifested through experimentation in space and time, bringing together masses and voids, presences and absences of matter, of sound and silence. Both are written and composed through drawing and design and constructed in another form
The Music Academy will provide its community a wide diversity of musical experiences and at the same time interact with the city providing a wide range of events. The building will accommodate different kinds of users, the general public and the musicians and students that have different necessities and different rhythms in the way they dwell in the building. The school is proposed as a space that is flexible and capable to adapt to the desires and needs of the multiple purpose program, according to the specific character of the activities of the Music Academy. The project materializes and constructs a programme and a space dedicated to the teaching and learning of music and dance, thus working as an open field where the different musical and acoustic geographies can operate with each other. The auditoriums and the cultural spaces that have a more direct relation with the city are on the ground floor. At the centre, an inner square that works like a court, the core of the school, where all sort of events can take place. From this space, a sculpted spiral ramp is the element that conducts us to all the other spaces of the project, and thus celebrating the social and cultural essence of the building as a community for a school.

[google-map-sc width=550 height=400 zoom=18]