Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Architect known for designing the Jewish Museum Berlin and winning the competition to replace the Twin Towers at Ground Zero.
On the island
Eight records
Academy of Ancient Music, conducted by Christopher Hogwood
before the singing starts, because it's summarized almost like a huge novel, or it summarizes the whole world. Everything that will happen subsequently and and the singing comes in and but I I thought that those bars are really an amazing compression of everything. It's very architectural as well.
String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130: V. Cavatina
playing one of my favorite. It was the B flat major fugue from the string quartet.
Atrium Musicae de Madrid, conducted by Gregorio Paniagua
These are fragments reconstructed from ancient manuscripts. So they're not inventions, but actual ancient Greek music, which is whether it's apocryphal or not, I love it.
Radio Television Orchestra of Krakow, conducted by Jürg Wyttenbach
I like it because actually it's not a composition, more like a dissemination of a spherical space of density.
It's a very lengthy piece of music. We'll hear only a fragment by Eric Sati.
The Ursunata is a kind of a poem linguistic to the force of the voice, actually, reinventing the language of speaking and singing.
Ornette Coleman Double Quartet
It's a totally improvised music, but it's ingenious.
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: AriaFavourite
The intensity of Bach's music and the intensity of Glen Gould's performance merge together into something that is really transcendental.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:00What do you mean by [saying architecture is the one profession in which you can't be a pessimist]?
You have to be if you're going to be an architect, because architecture is always dealing with con something constructive. It's about construction. It's about making life better. It's about the future. If you didn't believe in the future, you couldn't build.
Presenter asks
2:36So the optimism is in the attempt to create some kind of reconciliation, is it, with Germans and Jews and the past?
not so much reconciliation, but an understanding of that history, an understanding that the time moves on, that we cannot just be nostalgic and be stuck in some past, but that we have to take responsibility in an ethical, in an architectural way, for what that time passage means.
Presenter asks
7:27But there was a reason for the accordion, wasn't there?
There was. It's a strange and and in a way a sad reason because I wanted to play the piano and … after the war Poland was quite anti-Semitic and we were Jewish. We did not hide our Jewishness. … And my parents said, you know, w you know, we you know, we don't want the neighbors to see that we're bringing a piano. So we'll get you a small one inside of a suitcase which you can hide away.
The keepsakes
The book
The Prisons (Le Carceri d'Invenzione)
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Each one is is a is an imaginary text drawn in an architectural way. It's a kind of strange, almost impossible dream. And yeah, it has always been an inspiring book for me.
The luxury
I still love the pencil more than the computers that we have in our offices and all the modern implements. Uh and and a piece of paper, because I could do a lot. I mean, this is this would be a lot of fun to have it. I could write, I could draw, I could measure.
Presenter asks
13:46But eventually you gave it up. You stopped playing, even though you'd reached great heights playing in Carnegie Hall. Now, why?
I you know personally, I don't think I ever really gave it up. In in some sense, what I do now, which is drawing and and building and making architecture, is an extension of a sensibility that I acquired through playing music.
Presenter asks
14:56When did you last touch an instrument, the accordion or the [piano]?
Probably when I was about seventeen. … No, it's hard. You know, I've thought about it a lot. If you if you're if you perform for audiences, it's very hard to perform for yourself. I never thought of it as something that was amusement. I never thought of music as an an amusing thing. I never thought it just something to do for fun. I thought i it's it's an extension of a certain spirit and then I can't do it if it's not that spirit.
“If you didn't believe in the future, you couldn't build. You would just uh withdraw, you could write, you could sing, but you could not build. It's too permanent, too physical.”
“Architecture has to have the full range of emotions, particularly when it refers to issues of history. Jewish history in Berlin is not an easy history. Therefore, the building really has those dimensions as well. But it also has that light. And light brings something from the outside, something which is not of the building, something that is of the future and brings hope to that whole history.”
“We don't just think with our heads, we have to walk, we have feet, we have hands, we have eyes, we have ears, even the acoustical quality of a space gives a certain communication which is often underestimated.”