Jörg Petri
Digital Music Museum in Aschaffenburg
The Museum for Digital Music in Aschaffenburg presents a new environment for the experience of music in historical and contemporary terms. With the technology-driven, rapidly changing context of musical experiences, the museum co-opts the capacities of digital technology to transfer its ubiquitous and virtual mediation of music into a place-bound multi-media theatre. Hence, the proposal intervenes on the generic qualities of virtual media and re-enlists music as a specifically staged experience. It also counteracts the ephemeral condition of the digital and embeds this in the material-bound specificity of architecture.
Visitors to the museum can choose from an infinite storage library to relive past musical performances in immersive environments, pass through chronological organised exhibits of musical instruments and artefacts, examine exhibits of sound art, or select their own collections of multimedia experiences. Furthermore, the museum contains workshops for the production and live-rehearsal of music as well as a large performance hall for concerts.
The museum is situated on the Volksfestplatz by the Main River, next to the Willigsbrücke. It appropriates part of this public space to generate a new form of public theatre. The building design is based on an analysis of the muquarna motif in the Taj Mahal in India. The muquarna is an arch-motif, a complex two- and three-dimensional design pattern that can undergo a virtually endless series of transformations to accommodate different spatial conditions and functions.
For the Museum for Digital Music, the motif undergoes permutations according to phase-space rules. In other words, it undergoes a series of permutations between fixed states to provide architectural elements on different scales and for the deployment in both plan and section. For the large structural arches, variations in the basic radii are used to produce deformations and bends yield additional structural strength.
The building consists of a series of such large, interlaced steel-reinforced concrete arches. The openings between these arches are partly glazed and offer extensive views to the outside. The same interlacing of arches on a smaller scale, engender a spatially articulated façade structure within which the principle circulation is accommodated.