Bergen Open Form Pavilion of Air

Bergen Åpen Form Paviljong av Luft
Audiowork / Sound walk accessible via Echoes app
Duration variable 
Specific installation area: 68m long x 17m wide
Located at Bergenhus Festning Sverresborg , Bergen, Vestland, Norway, 2023
Developed in association with Bergen School of Architecture (Norway) as part the Cross Course with students PetterTakvam, Vida Boogh & Gunhild Korsøen

Access the work here and open it in the echoes app (not a browser)
Launched: 24 February 2023

Part of Open House Bergen festival 9-10 September 2023

The Pavilion is easy to access, just:
1. Download the Echoes app
2. Grab a mobile phone & headphones
3. Download the audiowork in the app (not a browser) using the link or QR code, save it to your phone so then its ready to open when at the location in Sverresborg Festning (above Bergenhus area)

Part of the pan-European Open Form Pavilion of Air series

 

An overview of the Open Form Pavilion of Air series via RTÉ Culture (Irish NRK equivalent):
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2023/0327/1366079-new-music-dublin-welcomes-you-to-the-open-form-pavilion-of-air/

“Bergen Åpen Form Paviljong av Luft” (Bergen Open Form Pavilion of Air) is a floating roof of sound extending over Bergenhus Festning Sverresborg, triggered by GPS and accessed via a smartphone, headphones and the echoes.xyz app. This audiowork developed with Bergen Arkitekthøgskole is one of 15 locations in 9 countries in the pan-European Open Form Pavilion of Air series, using sound and site-mapping to offer a playful renewal and reframing of public space as an essential place of engagement for the community. The series and its name draws on Oskar & Zofia Hansen’s “Open Form” architecture as well as the specific connection that the Hansens and Open Form in general have to the foundation work and formation of the Bergen Arkitekthøgskole (Bergen School of Architectur)e through Svein Hatløy - the only architecture school worldwide to currently teach "Open Form" as a living architectural practice and concept.

By walking through different zones atop Bergenhus Festning Sverresborg while using your mobile phone, the Echoes app and headphones, you become a participatory listener producing a composition in real-time. Your navigation creates a unique choreography via GPS, combining and changing sounds mapped along the site outside the main building through the app. Hear this hilltop and harbourside location and its context become transformed by the sounds forming this floating acoustic architecture, revealing an immersive, profoundly spatial and physical experience. The Pavilion has no visible presence outside the app and can only be accessed and enjoyed on-site in Sverresborg.

Also in the Open Form Pavilion of Air series:

Access BERGEN PAVILION OF AIR audiowork in Echoes app
Lublin Pavilion of Air
Prague AGENESIS Pavilion
Folldal Pavilion of Air
Bornholm Pavilion of Air
Dublin Pavilion of Air
London Pavilion of Air
Inis Oírr Pavilion of Air
Sound Art Lab Pavilion of Air
Cobh Pavilion of Air
Piteå Pavilion of Air
Berlevåg Pavilion of Air
Lofoten Pavilion of Air
Berlin Pavilion of Air

Additional information - Hansen’s pavilions employing hyperbolic paraboloid in Open Form architecture:
Stockholm International Fair (1953) with Stanislaw Zamecznik and Wojciech Zamecznik [info]
Hansen-Tomaszewski (HT) structure -  Izmir (Turkey, 1955) with Lech Tomaszewski [image] 
Sao Paolo (1959) with Lech Tomaszewski & Zofia Hansen [image]

Approaches underlying Hansen’s pavilions using the logos of 'Open Form' architecture:
The Pavilions of Air parallel Hansen’s move to use the designs for the international fair pavilions as* “testing ground for designs that shifted focus from the object to ‘cognitive space’: to the individuals using them” – the modulation of the individual’s perception by the Pavilion of Air occurs at a variety of levels, among them the individual’s experience and apprehension of “space” ie location around them and its context. [* quote: Krzysztof Kosciuczuk - Frieze magazine]

Equally, as a spatial choreography through which listeners each move through on their own paths to compose their own piece through this movement, the Pavilion of Air echoes Hansen’s “pavilion for the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival (with Zofia Hansen, 1958) [which] were not only meant to expose the displayed products (or music in the case of the latter), but also turn the visitors into active participants and co-creators of their spatial experiences”. In the case of the Pavilion of Air the displayed content is the site over which the invisible roof rests without the material support of walls, only sound, air and imagination… [quote: Institute of the Present - Aleksandra Kedziorek]

Furthermore, as Hansen commented during the Team 10 meetings in 1960 “Open Form has the task of helping the individual find himself amid the collective, to make himself indispensable in the formation of his own environment,” – the Pavilion of Air aims to allow, produce or effect a realization within the individual that reframes their engagement with the location, the site and thereby society-at-large.

It would seem that society should facilitate (and not impose, as Closed Form does) the development of the individual. There needs to be a synthesis between the objective, collective, social elements, and the subjective, individual elements.” Similarly the individual sound elements of the Pavilion of Air combine and are combined by the listener’s movement to produce a gestalt effect that facilitates this shift in site-perception.