36 Doors: Moving Sound
Architect Tor O. Austigard (Austigard Arkitektur) and curator/musician Martin Taxt collaborated to create a nonconventional space for music and the performing arts.
The result is truly awesome. A Tarkovsky-esque space that echoes emptiness and eternity, yets fills it with a rich perceptual experience of the now.
More than just blurring the division between stage and audience, the project sets the standard for a whole new way of experiencing music and performance. As the space can only be truly experienced while moving around, only moving images will be able to convey the architecture.
The project 36 Doors is an architectural intervention in an old warehouse in Stavanger, Norway, for the concert series Moving Sound. The core idea of the project has been to create a space for the performance of music where architecture and music interact. The architecture is more than just the stage for music, and the architecture is only fully realized when there is music in it.
The space has been made from 36 disused old doors as well as disused wooden structural members from a nearby building, all painted black. The doors create an enclosed space with musicians performing inside. Due to the position of the doors, only a fragment of the interior of the space can be seen at one time by the audience. Only through moving around is the totality of the space inside stitched together in the mind.
The space is filled with water and musicians will perform seemingly afloat in a vast, empty space with no outer limits. The sound of water unites music and space in a way reminiscent of movies by Tarkovsky.
