October 16, 2024

New York Magazine’s architecture and classical music critic Justin Davidson on ‘Why Do Concert Halls Still Matter?’ is featured on Curbed/New York Magazine.

Published in Diamond Schmitt’s new book SET PIECES: Architecture for the Performing Arts in Fifteen Fragments, Justin’s essay reflects on how, in our electronic and digital world, the concert hall—an antique architectural form—continues to resonate. 

As a society, we value that margin of uncertainty. We feel so strongly about preserving it that we erect large, expensive buildings for that purpose. A concert hall is a facility designed to generate indelible memories. This is where architects come in. Music can happen in a shed or a subway station. A violinist remains just as talented in her bedroom as on the stage of Carnegie Hall. But a great hall lies at the convergence of architecture, acoustics, and music. For the audience, the pleasures of seeing, hearing, and inhabiting a beautiful space merge in multisensory intensity. How high the ceilings rise, how intricately the walls curve and fold, how far the balconies extend, how steeply the floors are raked, how many seats fill how much square footage and what material they’re upholstered in — all these separately humdrum factors conspire to loft a crescendo so that it reaches the ear and hums through the body’s wires. We ask homes to give us comfort, offices to coax us into productivity, hospitals to help us heal; what we demand of concert halls is a regular opportunity to be moved.

The open-ended possibility of revelation is an expensive delight, especially when we look for it in symphonic music. Renovating David Geffen Hall in New York cost well over half a billion dollars, and that’s for a venue that already existed. The fact that Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic could raise such a fortune with relative ease, even during a pandemic, speaks to how highly the city values the act of coming together to hear natural, unamplified sounds milliseconds after players have produced them. That close and unmediated relationship between performers and listeners has been fundamental to music since a cave dweller first tapped two rocks together and a companion howled along. And yet, today, most humans consume most music most of the time as a series of electronic audio signals, often while absorbed in solitude. The concert hall has become a deluxe countercultural artifact.

Read Justin Davidson’s full essay on Curbed / New York Magazine here.

Set Pieces pairs the words of architects and leading critics with detailed visual explorations of Diamond Schmitt’s designs for some of the world’s most remarkable performing arts venues, illuminating the typology of performing arts buildings by spotlighting 15 design elements that enhance and transform the perception of performance. Learn more about Diamond Schmitt's new book here.