Piano Concerto: Piano transforms a factory into a concert hall that respects past and present and gives hope for the future.In the middle of Parma, close to the medieval centre, is a park complete with fine specimen trees of many species that curiously surround a disused disused Adjective no longer used Adj. 1. disused - no longer in use; "obsolete words" obsolete noncurrent - not current or belonging to the present time disused adj sugar factory. Renzo Piano Renzo Piano (September 14 1937) is a world renowned Italian architect and Pritzker Architecture Prize winner. Biography Piano was born in Genoa, where he still maintains a home and office (Building Workshop). Building Workshop was given the task of transforming the old building, a fine example of the nineteenth-century metal and mansonry functional tradition, into a new municipal concert hall. Piano's approach was radical. He decided to put the auditorium into the main factory, and use the ancillary building to the east to house a rehearsal room and all the services. Other subsidiary buildings were demolished. The main building was transformed. Its side elevations were retained and repaired, but all floors and cross walls were removed, though the roof and its steel trusses was repaired and restored. So a huge tunnel-like shed was created, three stories high and some 90m long. The long walls are reckoned to be stiff enough to withstand residual lateral thrusts from the roof and to remain stable longitudinally. Piano wanted to retain the magic of the enormous volume, its tectonic majesty and its close relationship to the surrounding park. Enclosure from the elements is achieved by making three transparent glass screens that take the place of the former opaque masonry cross walls. Visitors approach the building from the south, where the side walls and the roof project beyond the first glass screen to form a breathtaking, Chiricoesque portico portico (pôr`tĭkō), roofed space using columns or posts, generally included between a wall and a row of columns or between two rows of columns. that both welcomes you and shades the glass wall. Through this transparent barrier, you enter a foyer that is on two levels, joined by a grand public stair. Ticket boxes and a cloakroom cloak·room n. 1. A room where coats and other articles may be left temporarily, as in a theater or school. Also called coatroom. 2. A private lounge adjacent to a legislative chamber. (behind the stairs) greet you as you come in. Up stairs See Upstairs in the Vocabulary. See also: Stair , you look through another great glass wall down the auditorium to the stage, and beyond that, through the huge volume's transparent north wall to the trees and lawns of the park again. Piano was keen to let the almost Roman structural dignity of the old industrial work speak for itself. To make such a rectangular and austere space appropriate for music, walls are treated with acoustic plaster and ceilings are absorbent absorbent /ab·sor·bent/ (-sor´bent) 1. able to take in, or suck up and incorporate. 2. a tissue structure involved in absorption. 3. a substance that absorbs or promotes absorption. too. Designed to accommodate both a symphony orchestra and a large choir, the stage is about 250m square. Sound from its platform is projected onto the 780 seats of the auditorium by hovering bent-wood reflectors. Surprisingly, the atmosphere seems right. For all the apparent austerity and hardness, reverberation times are not long. Most unusually for a concert hall, you can see out into the park during performances -- all the old windows have been retained, save for the ones on the east side of the hall, which would have looked directly onto the smaller services building. Of course, blinds can be used to mask windows as directors of individual performances want. Perhaps one of the most poignant arrangements is when blinds are left open (or partly so) on the upper tier of windows only, allowing light to shine down into the interior, almost as it does from the clerestory clerestory or clearstory (both: klĭr`stōr'ē, –stôr'ē), a part of a building whose walls rise higher than the roofs of adjoining parts of the structure. of a medieval cathedral, where the body of the church is dim with stained glass stained glass, in general, windows made of colored glass. To a large extent, the name is a misnomer, for staining is only one of the methods of coloring employed, and the best medieval glass made little use of it. , but luminance The amount of brightness, measured in lumens, that is given off by a pixel or area on a screen. For example, dark red and bright red would have the same chrominance, but a different luminance. comes from the sky. The Nicola Paganini auditorium is the latest in a series of the Building Workshop's wonderful transformations of fine old buildings, ranging from Palladio's canonical Basilica basilica (bəsĭl`ĭkə), large building erected by the Romans for transacting business and disposing of legal matters. Rectangular in form with a roofed hall, the building usually contained an interior colonnade, with an apse at one end in Vicenza (AR March 1987) to Giacomo Matte-Trucco's amazing Fiat factory at Lingotto in Turin (AR March 1989 and AR November 1996). The Eridania sugar factory may not have been as distinguished as those two, but Piano's boldness has as usual transformed the old for new uses while enhancing existing essential qualities and creating a new presence, combining the properties of cathedral with Modern Movement notions of the endless shed and close contact with nature. RELATED ARTICLE: Architect Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa Project team D. Hart, M. Alvisi, G. Anzani, G. Chimeri, D. De Macina, E. Guazzone, G. Guerrieri, with D. Cavagna, S. Rossi (model maker) Structural engineer P. Costa Services engineer Manens Intertecnica Landscape Paghera Acoustics Muller BBM BBM Brokeback Mountain (book/movie) BBM Bureau of Broadcast Measurement BBM Bachelor of Business Management BBM Break Before Make BBM Bread Board Model BBM Bulk Business Mail BBM Bahn Brenner Motorsport Interiors F. Santolini Photographs Enrico Cano |
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