Porto, Portugal
Mission Title: Symphonic Spaceship - Rem Koolhaas' Casa da Musica
Mission By: Kathrin Hillebrand, Rosangela Araújo
Mission Finished on Date: 09-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Visit Porto.
- Before heading the Casa de Musica, take a look around the city center. Show other landmarks like the Palàcio da Bolsa or the Oporto Cathedral and the way they melt – or not – with their surroundings.
- Ask people on your way to Koolhaas' auditorium for directions, and what do they think about the building. Highlight the way it stands out the landscape. Visit the inside spaces, ask someone who works there about its relationship with the neighborhood.
- Try and shoot the mission as a path from more classical landmarks to this new presence in the city, recording the impressions of locals.
- A building's effect on the urban environment and the lives of those who live near it can be very subtle and difficult to tease out. Though many shots of the building are important, don't do just that, really creatively interact with the space, find a way into its interior other than its doors. Find a way to tell a story about the building, the neighborhood, the city, yourself, or others, fictive or real, just make sure the Casa de Musica is a character.
TRAVEL BAG
How does a huge architectural structure melt with an open space?
Cities use monumental buildings for various purposes, the projects ain't cheap, and the structures become both landmarks with in and with out the city. Buildings, unlike fictions and drawings, have to bear the weight of of not only the limitations of physics and material, but also politics, money, and more generally context.
In Porto, Rem Koolhaas' Casa da Musica has been looked upon as a proud monument that bends and shapes itself to the neighborhood as it bends and shapes the neighborhood. Porto's Rotunda da Boavista is an ample square inside the city's business center and Koolhaas' Casa da Musica is right across the street. Koolhaas wanted to make it as reflective of its context as he could, so he used neutral – if not transparent – surfaces and mostly local materials and furnishing the interiors with locally designed patterns and furniture from the 70s and 80s. Koolhaas' design, if seen from the outside, results in a huge whitish geometrical structure that at one angle looks like a colossal spaceship at another a domestic setting. The design details have dazzled architecture critics, but as for integrating in the context this building looks like Elton John at a Nazi rally making an effort by dressing in black.
