Music Hall in the Sky

Music Hall in the Sky is a small concert hall for classical music with about 50 seats in a residential area of Tokyo. In spite of a location surrounded by collective housing and three-story houses, you can listen to the music in an environment where only the sky seems to exist outside the window because you cannot see the adjacent houses through the windows of the hall.

Concert halls are commonly designed with no windows. For staging reasons and the necessity of sound insulation, the general approach is to separate concerts as special events from everyday life by having no windows in the hall, especially in the case of big halls. However, for small concert halls, we believe that no windows present a major disadvantage because it creates a sense of captivity in the audience, and that a windowless hall is not appropriate for a space that should be relaxing. Meanwhile, there is a line of adjacent buildings very close to the boundary of this estate. If windows were made in the usual manner, it would be impossible to achieve the proper landscape as background to enjoying a concert.

Therefore, we decided to place windows so that only the sky could be seen and made sure that the surrounding buildings could not be seen from the inside of the hall. Inevitably, windows are positioned in the upper part of the space, like the ceiling, so that seeing the sky is not surprising when you look up.

But we also thought that if you could see the sky when looking lower than eye level, it would be a very unusual experience similar to looking out the window of a plane, and this would make you feel as if the whole building were surrounded by the sky instead of buildings. We set up a ribbon window at the foot of the stage combining the mirror and the top light to reflect the sky right above. We hope this hall will allow listeners to enjoy concerts and escape everyday life for a while on a Sunday afternoon by watching the blue sky and the relaxing motion of floating clouds.