Architecture as Instrument: Acoustic and Spatial Variability in Piano+Rogers’ Espace de projection at IRCAM, Paris (1978)

The Institut de Recherche et Coordination d’Acoustique et de Musique (IRCAM) is a large computer music research and production institute in Paris, funded by the French state. Originally a fully underground structure between the Centre Pompidou and the adjacent Church of Saint-Merri, and designed by the same team of Piano + Rogers, the building and its facilities were to enable an encounter between musical composition and contemporary science, and thus propel French art music back to the forefront of the avant-garde. This chapter focuses on IRCAM’s pièce de resistance, namely the so-called Espace de projection (Project Room). Meant as a laboratory for acoustic research and musical experimentation, the room’s reverberation time could be altered through electronically controlled rotating prisms and a movable ceiling, thus epitomizing the fascination amongst musical composers, then, with the manipulation of sonic perception and the spatialization of sound, as well as the obsession in the contemporary architectural debate with flexibility and adaptability. By providing the first contextual analysis of the Espace de projection’s architectural and acoustical ambitions, features and failures, this paper illustrates how this project explored – and ultimately ran into – the limits of acoustic variability, functional adaptability and spatial flexibility.