A Sheet-Music Façade in Washington Heights
School in community charter of the musical community of Washington Heights of Gluck +.
Photo: Gluck + Gluck +
Being demoralized about the state of architecture is like sitting on a bean chair: it is an easy position in which to collapse and a fight to go out. Ten years ago, the architect Reinier de Graaf published an attempt which bubbed with dismay. He wrote that in the 20th century, modernists, motivated by utopian desires, produced truly egalitarian buildings – “social mobility captured in concrete”. In the 21st century, this mission was canceled. “Architecture is now a capital tool, an accomplice of an antithetic goal to its former ideological company.” Also padded by nostalgia and anhistoric shortcuts as these declarations are, its complaint still resonates. As long as they are at school, students can bask in urgent problems such as the attenuation of climate change; Once a graduate, they will work for companies that are obedient after holders of power and money. Utopia and capital occasionally form a dark alliance as in Saudi Arabia mortal plan For the linear city of 100 miles from Neom. In New York, social ideals are mainly expressed in affordable housing projects where budgets are so tight and constraints so serious that they have often (but not always) designed by a bot.
Then comes a project that draws you from this bag of sadness without form. The school with a community music charter of Washington Heights – Inwood, or Win, holds in the middle of the west of the 162nd street, enveloping the shell of an old garage. You can say that it is the solitary institutional building on a residential block of the yellow school-bus canopy and the shiny metal coating, like a box of flattened beans. There is no obvious radiance of good humor until you are directly in front, cross the street and take the range of dance windows. Cameled in yellow, they come together or spread out, derive or flow along the groups of horizontal lines. A beat, and chance solves. Each window is a note, or Neume, And each floor a musical stopover presented as a page of a medieval manuscript. This is a singable facade.
Non -metaphorical song continues inside, where all students, ranging from children from kindergarten to eighth year students, take music lessons twice a day, the choir and the orchestra. The visit of the Faculty of Juilliard also did private lessons, but Win is the opposite of an elite greenhouse for budding virtuosos; The school does not charge for tuition fees, admits the students of the lottery, does not hold any hearing and treats music neither as a full well nor a career path but as a fundamental educational tool. After a year of kindergarten prologue spent playing on paper instruments (built by the team by children and parents), first -year students are assigned an instrument with which they stick to their departure. Gluck +, the company that designed the school, placed 450 instrument cubbies – quarter -size violins below, full -size – in the center of traffic so that students can store them in the morning and recover them later without creating a blockage.
Instrument storage near the traffic center.
Photo: here and now agency
The design is led by objective, as is the weight. He emulates El Sistema from Venezuela, a national network of public schools that arm music children as a way to deal with poverty. The former the former most famous of the system is the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who is ready to take over as a musical director of the New York Philharmonic. During my first visit, I visited the building with the architect Tom Gluck and the founder of the school, Charlie Ortiz. Soft with voice, straight back and large (with a quiff which adds a few inches to its size), Ortiz is the kind of educator who, according to a cynical, does not really exist. It took him a decade to translate a concept in an institution, then ask, command, build and open a new $ 44 million building. It is a trajectory powered by the same values that he hopes that music can instill in his students: sincerity, commitment and follow -up.
The entrance to the school on the west of the 162nd street between Broadway and Amsterdam.
Photo: here and now agency / Paul seen
The building increases only eight floors, but because it is narrow and larger than the neighboring structures, the sun flows on both sides, painting the central corridor with light stripes. You can read the time at the angle of the rays on the ground. Because it is on high terrain, its south -facing windows offer views that sweep the Hudson to the Midtown cushion. The school yellow and blue appear on the lockers, the carpet, the padding, the office chairs and the uniforms. But the most striking use of color is the massive farm which frames a gymnasium with double height on the top floor. This large thatched Azure Steel is the rhythm section of the building, the part that keeps it all together and allows you to dive five new stories above a three-level garage without killing anything. From the inside of the gymnasium, the dance windows seem to have a party, a dive low enough for the youngest students to kneel and look at the world, others too high to strike with a basketball ball. But it is the children who have the most fun to visit, howling with pleasure through a volleyball introduction. They do not seem to know of the immemorial disdain of musicians for the PE class.
Live blue and yellow, school colors appear throughout the building, including on the structural farms on the ground.
Photo: here and now agency / Paul seen
Music schools can be brutal places, soaked in envy and moistened by tears. But while I walk, he looks like me everyone Having fun – Whether or the teachers, students and staff all received the same instructions for smiling on the visit of foreigners. The smiling atmosphere is unfortunately at Midwest. I have no illusions that the photo filled with the sun that I obtained from a supervised visit is even close. The vast majority of students live below the poverty line, many fight against English, some have learning disabilities or mental health challenges – Whin welcomes them all. I suspect that for many, school is an oasis of clarity and rigor. If you are a cellist, sitting straight is not only a sop for a stick adult; This is what you do to control the arc arm. When you are in an orchestra, being in time does not only mean sliding in your seat while the bell still sounds; This means hitting the note to the right fraction of a second so as not to sabotage everyone.
During my second visit, with the new president of New York Philharmonic (and a longtime friend of Dudamel), Matias Tarnopolsky, we deposited in the auditorium on the ground floor where a few tens of seventh year heated a boogie-woogie arrangement for strings and percussion. It was like looking at the picking up precision to infiltrate the minds of students. After a quarter of an hour, the bass line rushed instead of turning back on. The shoulders began to contract in synchronization. Clamour froze in music. The need to channel that the fluid process has shaped the building: the architects took care to minimize chaos and threat, to calculate the trajectory of the choir room in the laboratory, to provide a place to store the music stands and to design these instrument cubbies as the first and last stop of the day.
The compact but well -adjusted auditorium is the heart of the structure, circulating music from the same place where the garage has once pumped cars. Since the hall is sandwiched by front and rear glass walls, passers -by who take a look from the sidewalk can see the stage and the rows of blue theater seats. The staff draw a curtain during periods of rehearsal to prevent the eyes of children from heading to the street, but the connection is established: it is a neighborhood school, and orchestral music is a local activity. The architects gave the body to this belief with a wavy wooden ceiling that begins above the scene, takes place on the hall and ends in a brilliant canopy at point like the peak of a yellow baseball cap. It is a decision that converts excellent acoustics inside into a confident attitude outside.
The auditorium directly faces the street.
Photo: here and now agency
A panel above the auditorium door carries the Credo El Sistema in Spanish and in English: “Touch and fight. Play and strive. “Good translation,” said Tarnopolsky, born in Argentina. (Struggle could more obviously, but less happy, be returned as combat.) On leaving, Ortiz has spoken of its aspirations: add winds and brass to the sets; Provide more tête-à-tête instructions; Hire a part -time instrument doctor to bring the beaten violins. “I bet what you really like is that 500 children play together,” said Tarnopolsky. On the spot, he promised to transport them all to Geffen Hall in May, where they will attend a Philharmonic New York rehearsal led by Dudamel, then hire the big stage for their own rehearsal. But perhaps the most important trip this day will be the return of Lincoln Center to Washington Heights, because it will not be the disappointment that would have turned upside down, if they were brought back to a fleeting, dull, overcrowded school and to do like so many people in New York.
I wrote a lot about architecture and music, sometimes even on the architecture of music. But I had never thought much of a building designed to alleviate music, day after day, in the subconscious. Most Whin students today will earn a living in non -musical occupations. At 40, they can amaze that they could never display a melody on the neck of an alto, because playing an instrument, I can tell you, is quite different from cycling. And yet, eight years of two musical periods every day cannot fail to infuse things in the tissues and neurons of a child, especially when they occur in a place where someone designed to smooth the absorption process. You could even call the result “the mental mobility captured in concrete”.
