Harmony and Dissonance: From Growth to Richness through Music. A requiem to vaults and values
Isometric
Building upon notions of 'degrowth', my project, a piano upcycling facility and music center, aims to bring awareness to people's shifting cultural values and questions the current throw-away society.
School/Level
Category
Year
Pianos - An instrument once largely culturally relevant and significant is nowadays disposed of in abundance. My project explores how through the use of a material library for the upcycling of pianos at Craigleith, their value can be reinvirgorated architecturally, socially and culturally. The scheme is a narrative weaving of reinterpretation of materials and specifically pianos- not as finite objects, but as a lengthy and labour-intensive process with complex inner mechanisms and lives of their own. The culmination of the project is the music school and the performance space where the celebration between people and materials is orchestrated through the medium of music and through the vessel of architecture. While more and more pianos will be thrown away, the music school will grow, directly through the piano frames that will be added and indirectly through a counter-argument to the idea of disposal instead of reuse. Further zooming out, this project could act as precedent for other retail parks, or abandoned buildings situated around the centre which would become obsolete in the future. The parks would therefore turn into nodes of attraction for surrounding areas, creating a further sense of locality, promoting the notion of degrowth and connecting people through culture and music.