--- title: "What Casa da Musica Set Me Thinking" canonical: "https://banuucak.com/en/casa-da-musica/" date: "2022-05-05" author: "Banu Uçak" description: "Rem Koolhaas's Casa da Musica in Porto, a guided tour with my small son, and the suspicion that provocation itself now feels cringe." categories: ["essays"] lang: "en" --- ## Rem Koolhaas, Cringe, and the Mad Questions in My Head... **Portugal**, grown rich beside the ocean in the Age of Discovery, and with its capital levelled by one of the greatest earthquakes the world has seen (1755), became almost the stage on which the balance of power in Europe changed hands. With the cruelty of colonialism and the wealth it created, this beautiful country, where not only money but cultures were layered and worked like lace, could not escape the ill-starred fate of those who fall behind in the race. It was put to the test by emigration, crushed by the iron fist of dictatorship and by poverty, and with the Carnation Revolution it came to a democracy "of its own kind". Like all who have been through a great deal, Portugal is contradictory, uncanny, cruel, fascinating and beautiful. Precisely because of this heritage and this tangle, so hard to define, there is a kind of gusto to be sensed in the urban space, an emotional richness. On my short journey to **Portugal**, where the history of the last few centuries is, relatively, a history of loss, I did not really feel, though the country is often likened to **Istanbul**, the longing for past days of splendour that is carved into our DNA, nor the psychology of the one who has lost. My attempt to explain, by this "complexity and contradiction", why this distant country on the edge of Europe is home to two architects who have won the **Pritzker**, which stands at the head of the world's most prestigious architecture prizes (**Alvaro Siza Vieira** and **Eduardo Souto de Moura**), may again be the fruit of the same intuitive invention. But my belief was confirmed: nothing wholly complete, flawless and clearly bounded can truly be beautiful, or be enough to lift the human spirit. Portugal, at least as far as I saw, was very beautiful. ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-4411-scaled.BUMKWc7L_Z21clXh.webp "Alvaro Siza Vieira, Bo Vista Tea House, Porto") ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/2022-04-18-06-23-33-604-1-scaled.CouR3Tbf_Z1WvczP.webp "The River Douro, Porto") ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/20220423-140124-1-scaled.ShZokKGh_25OVAr.webp "Monument to the Discoveries, Lisbon") Since I have spoken of this complexity and contradiction, I want to talk about **Rem Koolhaas**, whom I came upon in Porto, the intellectual of the architecture world, a true provocateur and theorist, and about **Casa da Musica**, signed by **OMA**, which he founded. When one speaks of **Rem Koolhaas** and his buildings, it is not possible to speak of the intuitive maturity I praise in the buildings of **Alvaro Siza**, of the skill of hands that know how to touch the human spirit, of the virtuosity with which material becomes one with nature. That is not the aim, either. What a person needs is not only the buildings that dissolve into nature, jewel-like, not built but "appearing". Like every beautiful thing, the human being too is complex, uncanny and contradictory. We have both the skill of raising vast cities for ourselves and the weakness of being swallowed by those cities, and destroyed. **Koolhaas** is the son of a Dutch father who was a critic, the grandson of a grandfather who was an architect, a man who studied journalism and chose architecture at a relatively mature age: in the lightest phrase, the "thinking" child of Europe. It can be said that he is the last great architect after **Corbusier** to think about cities, urbanisation and scale, or, to put it more simply, about what in the modern is not stuck inside its own time, about what is fluid and what is of the present. ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/arch2o-10-lessons-to-learn-from-rem-koolhaas-17.nHohfg6y_1jE4mC.webp "Photograph: Ralph Mecke, Vogue Russia") In his buildings, form is not a shell that rises from the ground and is justified by pure function. It is rather a shell that appears after the idea. Looking through his body of work, you will not find the continuity of form we are used to in **Zaha**, in **Gehry**, in **Chipperfield**. It can be said that he carries on the line of another intellectual, **Peter Eisenman**, who (fortunately) builds little and writes a great deal. It was Eisenman himself who, in his time, directed him to **Philip Johnson** to secure the funds he needed for "**Delirious New York**", the book that shook the architecture world. Eisenman had put forward the idea of "**freeing architecture from form**". For this very reason I was not at all surprised, though I do not agree, when **Rem Koolhaas**, stepping onto the stage in 2000 to receive the **Pritzker Prize** he had won, said, "**Peter Eisenman** should have been here in my place." I do not agree, because, though I do not wish to admit it, I too am one of the conservatives whom **Koolhaas** criticises, and I cannot give up the belief (or the feeling) that architecture should keep at least some relation to form (it is easy to admire the buildings of **Eisenman**, but in this sense very hard to love them). The designs of **Koolhaas**, precisely because of this indirect relation he sets up with form, and because of the intellectual effort, become subjects of high culture even though he does not intend it. They are not easy to appreciate with everyday knowledge and everyday manners, nor to understand fully. The quiet demolition in 2016, met by no reaction worth the name, of the **Netherlands Dance Theatre** in **The Hague**, the building that introduced **Koolhaas** to the world in 1987 and that is almost his manifesto on architecture, is both tragicomic and a sign that his theories, at least in part, were right. **Koolhaas** has at times stood radically against the idea of conservation itself, and he finds the architecture world, and the auteur architects who have become stars, conservative. I have arrived, in my usual manner, by roundabout paths, and I ought to tell the story of **Casa da Musica** from the start. As part of a programme to begin and prepare various urban and cultural interventions for the city of Porto, in the period when **Porto** was **European Capital of Culture** in **2001**, **OMA** won the competition for "**Casa da Musica**". ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/3077face407f9594b3d0c086c46a50ee857e91c7-1133x755-1.DDrS3RDm_Z1mHw4K.webp "Casa da Musica, Porto, photograph ©OMA") ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/97058a963d22cb98091e491ddf738fe1a11e82f7-1133x755-1-1.CbK95PMS_FOGPj.webp) **Casa da Musica** (the House of Music), designed as the home of the **National Orchestra of Porto**, stands on a plot at the edge of the **Rotunda** in **Boavista**, the historic centre of **Porto**. There is a "**shoebox**" analogy that the team tells at length wherever it goes (it has nothing to do with the shoebox we know). The **OMA** team say that for the last 30 years (it is 40 now) every architect building a place for music, meaning of course the star architects and the buildings meant to be iconic, has struggled to break and to change the shoebox shape, whose acoustic superiority is beyond dispute, while they themselves designed by accepting that reality. Two boxes carved into the mass that is meant to be **iconic**, the support services wrapped around the void, and a playful travertine platform prepared so as to relate to the city, make up the basic dynamics of the building. Yet every decision of material and of space has been thought through, from the floating bar we also remember from the **NDT**, to the pattern of the concert hall's wall cladding, showy (to my mind), to the placing of two harpsichords of baroque appearance at either side of the stage, to the concert hall that receives daylight, to the brushed **aluminium** of the floor, which I could swear drove the acousticians mad, to the ostentatious use of **corrugated glass**. All of the decisions aim to question certain assumptions already in place, and to surprise those who take those assumptions for granted (most of them, unloved as they are, are **the elite**). For anyone curious, all of it has been written and drawn a great deal. I want to talk about a few things that matter to me. ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7699-scaled.CnenSjEQ_19RwIJ.webp) https://youtu.be/tAxl7k1vRl4 First, the **artificial topography** on which the building sits has made a singular plinth for this building, which at root aims both to be part of the historic city centre and to stand apart from it. The **OMA** team, who criticise the fact that cultural buildings of this kind are used only by certain sections of the city (the guilty, treacherous **elites** of the world), seem, through the clever relation the building makes with the ground, to have broken that habit not only in theory but in practice. I also find it deeply symbolic, and important, that the whole of the 2016 documentary **REM** was filmed at **Casa da Musica**, and in this anti-elite, almost anarchist, fluid spirit. Inside, there is no foyer that serves, in the traditional sense, as a place to gather. The relation made through material and geometry ties the spaces left over from the concert hall to the city. I did not experience **Casa da Musica** during a performance. I took a guided tour, which at times became extremely painful, with my son, who was two and a half. I heard a great many allusions and anecdotes, some of which I found clever and some forced. Watching the way a child experiences a space, though, I can say I decided that **Koolhaas** had reached the rebellion against the conventional that he was aiming for. I know that to speak of sharp corners, of glass, of metal surfaces, of spaces a pushchair cannot pass, the things that drive a mother out of her mind, is counted as straying from the essence, and is frowned upon, when the subject is architectural quality and "the idea". I am determined not to fall into that error. The **House of Music**, a **skateboard platform** that buzzes with life even when there is no concert inside, has long since celebrated its tenth year, as one of the important traces that an intelligent, intellectual architect and his team left on a historic city. I cannot help thinking: we are in a post-truth age, in which even Koolhaas defining himself as a provocateur has become conventional. To reason cleverly is no longer held in much prestige. To catch someone on the wrong foot is much harder than it used to be. In the new phrase, is it not a little "**cringe**"? ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7726-scaled.DafrH_Zv_Z1VCd3i.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7955-scaled.BkjitcZp_qqHpH.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7702-scaled.A00VXXXi_ZcbS9c.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7704-scaled.DXTlYeWy_ZpXtA7.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7705-scaled.XtNyPflt_ZTYHF1.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7708-scaled.DSYaLzWE_2ioGQh.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7710-scaled.B3BWrjqj_Z2riWnA.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7711-scaled.BthAykNe_ZIIevt.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7719-scaled.BmbL6Zlz_Z6NK4Q.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7695-scaled.D30yvx_-_Z17yepQ.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7717-2-scaled.CuVsZSiT_1yyLkI.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/20220419-153135-scaled.D5eIxxtk_6JuO6.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7722-scaled.CugH937-_RffRj.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/eef2010e-5766-4cda-9aef-aee0634fda38.DqNnZVIW_xYFWt.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-4339-scaled.3KyhWTDo_Z10xtz.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7714-scaled.DOSAMJlF_19yLYU.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7718-scaled.DCdyW-sD_Zyq5S5.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7723-scaled.C4NTtJyA_Scu8M.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7724-scaled.D58q5mzN_WbCN2.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7960-scaled.BQRXnl2p_Zb671a.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7962-scaled.Dvetat0s_Z1Ix4Jc.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7963-scaled.Q_iMp-5l_Z1obOA5.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7964-scaled.CoWgcZ4-_CivMr.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7973-scaled.CcWvVf1p_ZUuQlr.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7977-scaled.CZimboih_yMR1V.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7978-scaled.BgRQjPRX_tJs9.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7980-scaled.BB53S1wH_eppcv.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7981-scaled.D2vkI97n_Z2ws7i8.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7983-scaled.DzRXFuYB_Z1GWeuC.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7985-scaled.CXl9xnxs_15wpYJ.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-7989-scaled.Bw_82odd_ZcklWx.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8005-scaled.DAj_NqTI_2dxKWr.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8006-scaled.DIATMGtl_Z1xMAKO.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8011-scaled.B4U7nJFZ_Zf4r6q.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8012-scaled.CKEGON41_285dDQ.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8015-scaled.CMP0saJI_Z1bacPo.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8016-scaled.Cfi7zPtU_1EBswv.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8022-scaled.BI3KL60u_Z2ovtph.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8030-scaled.FLlJDYbE_wQCgj.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8032-scaled.Cw8xvwDL_mWvTM.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8035-scaled.Co2DIhDX_Z1mG74R.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8037-scaled.D2-nDGhQ_ZqGSns.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8038-scaled.Cu_jue2p_FYf1t.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/img-8040-scaled.B7OOATXZ_qTqe3.webp)