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As abstract art forms based on rhythm, proportion and harmony, architecture and music share a clear cultural lineage. Now, through digital expression, architecture can attain new heights of creative supremacy
'All art' Walter Pater famously observed in 1877, 'constantly aspires towards the condition of music.' Why the music envy? Because, the standard answer goes, in abstract music the form and content - or in its case the sound and sense - are one integrated thing. Pater's aphorism became a good prediction of the Zeitgeist and the goal for abstract art in 30 years as the painters in Paris and elsewhere pursued a kind of visual equivalent of musical themes, and Expressionist and Cubist architects followed suit. Indeed architecture as frozen music' had a long history of tracking its sister, the parallel art of harmonic and rhythmic order.
Many qualities unite theee two art forms - and quite a few make them different - but it is the former I find compelling today. Their shared concerns can be seen in ceremonial architecture from tbe ancient Brodgar Stone Circle to concert halls, in structures that heighten the senses and make one perceive more sharply and emotionally. In an era when museums and other building types emerge as a suitable place for musical ornament, and when expressive shapes can be produced digitally, architecture could reach its supreme condition once again and become its own particular kind of music.
The cosmic codes
Since at least the sixth century BC, music and architecture have been intimately joined by a cosmic connection, the idea that they both are generated by an underlying code. This order, revealed by mathematics and geometry, was first espoused by Pythagoras who lived in southern Italy, and it led to many Greek temples designed on proportional principles revealing not only supreme beauty but the music of the heavenly spheres' - either God or nature. The idea was so appealing that many later designers tried to capture the notion with new materials. For instance, as Rudolf Wittkower argued, Renaissance architects saw the cosmic connections in simple ratios such as 1:1 (a sound repeating itself, or the architecture of a square room), and 2:1 (the octave, a string doubled or halved in length, or in building the double-square...