Sax Music Hall
The Sax Music Hall is the result of a process of architectural and urban reactivation that recovers an unfinished cultural infrastructure, transforming it into a fully functional, accessible public facility linked to the municipality’s collective identity. The intervention begins by acknowledging the building’s material and symbolic value, understanding its long-standing status as a halted construction site as an opportunity to rethink its role within Sax’s urban and cultural fabric.
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The project’s origins date back to 2008, when the Sax City Council promoted the construction of a large-scale cultural complex for the town, with more than 3,000 m2 distributed over four levels. The scheme included a music hall, a library, chamber music rooms, a music school, and conference spaces. The works were halted because of the economic crisis, leaving the building reduced to its structure, facades, and roof, with no interior development. For years it remained an empty volume with no defined use.
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The proposal responds to this situation through a clear program and a spatial organization oriented toward versatility. A multipurpose music hall is designed to adapt to different stage formats and to host everything from concerts and theatrical performances to conferences and institutional events. The interior is built around a continuous cladding system that unifies the hall, stage, and acoustic envelope under a strong chromatic identity in pink tones, creating an immersive, contemporary, and easily recognizable atmosphere. The intervention relies on modular repetition, material coherence, and precision of detail, avoiding superfluous gestures and reinforcing a clean reading of the volume, where every decision responds to a functional, acoustic, or perceptual criterion.
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The side walls are articulated through a regular vertical layout that alternates timber elements with integrated sound-absorbing surfaces. This combination allows the balance between reflection and absorption to be controlled, optimizing acoustic comfort without sacrificing a warm and close perception of space. A darker, more neutral lower plinth acts as a protective band against intensive use and provides a stable visual base that contrasts with the upper area, which is brighter and more uniform. The transition between both strata organizes perception from the seating area, helps establish an appropriate scale, and reinforces the hall’s unity, where the rhythm of the layout and the continuity of surfaces shape the audience experience.
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Acoustics became a determining design criterion and materialized in an adjustable acoustic shell, conceived simultaneously as a technical and compositional element. Its geometry is designed to collect, control, and project sound into the hall, allowing the acoustic response to be tuned to different uses (music, speech, institutional events) and ensuring consistent sound quality for a diverse program. This element is formally integrated with the cladding system, maintaining continuity of materials and tonalities and reinforcing the interior’s visual unity, so that the technical dimension is not concealed, but becomes part of the architectural language.
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Lighting is understood as an active component of the interior design and is integrated through recessed vertical lines placed at the joints between panels. These luminaires create a steady luminous rhythm, emphasize the height of the space, and provide a scenography reading of the walls without the need for additional elements. Warm, even light avoids harsh shadows, supports orientation, and enables different atmospheres depending on the event, accompanying activity without competing with it. In this way, acoustics, materiality, and lighting work in coordination to offer a comfortable, efficient, and technically controlled space.
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The result is a technically effective and expressive interior, where modulation, light, and acoustics operate as a single coherent system. From an architectural and urban perspective, the intervention also incorporates a clear expressive dimension through a contemporary color palette that redefines the building’s image and removes the perception of an “unfinished ruin” associated with its recent past. This gesture strengthens its presence within the surroundings, turns it into a recognizable landmark, and activates its relationship with public space and the community, shifting from a closed volume to an accessible and meaningful reference.
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The music hall thus gains a distinct identity, flexibility, and a renewed architectural language, ready to sustain a stable and diverse cultural program. Beyond formal intent, the project acts as a mechanism of re-signification: it completes an unfinished building and returns it to the city as an open, shared, and optimistic space conceived as a place of encounter and a future for Sax.
