Crescendo – A Space for Music

The Project celebrates the nature of music - to proliferate and flow. The crystalline shell develops as an extension of the existing timber pitched roof, growing as plywood clad faceted surfaces in the foyer and erupting out as a brooding, dramatic volume with light washing over the surfaces. As the roof continues to extend unabashedly, the robust brick walls wrap around the project, to contain the chaos - creating a water channel where one is in between the roof and the wall. As one is seated in the performance space, the irregular openings ventilate the space, as the parapet outside folds and twists to match the windows like a curtain of brick. There is a constant dialogue between the design language existing and the new in terms of structure, space, and materiality. The expansive volume and faceted surfaces arise from the acoustic needs of choir music as well as a gesture to the pitched roof. Be it the way the ever-extending facets seamlessly meet the brick plinth or the way the pivot door blends into the foyer becoming a part of the intervention - The project aims to express the programme both formally and spatially through its tectonic resolution.

The design process was a very tactile one – model making, sketching and hand drafting as the tools to express the design. The approach was taking an abstract dramatic idea – one that is rooted in a sensorial experience and translating it into a buildable space with factors like structure, material and detailing as tools. Being an intervention to an existing site changes the design process – every decision is a response to the existing and how one meaningfully harmonizes or contests the built is a negotiation that happens throughout the process at various scales. Overall, the project gains its meaning through the relationships it creates with its context and the programme.

The Output is a set of working drawings that bring the abstract expressive ideas to live through its meticulous detailing and tectonic resolution. The set containing some key diagrams explaining the refinement of form, exploded axonometric which explains the coming together of different elements, materials, and systems; is collated by hand in a single 8’ x 4’ sheet, where at one glance, one can correlate and understand the project to its fullest. The form of presentation and the design itself are intertwined, coming from a tactile, intuitive, and rigorous design process.