An Open Form Pavilion of Air is a floating acoustic architecture, triggered by GPS and accessed via a smartphone, headphones and the echoes.xyz app.  The Open Form Pavilion of Air series is made up of 15 of these audioworks across 9 countries, each offers a playful renewal and reframing of public space as an essential engagement for the community. The series of audioworks draws its name from Polish architects Oskar & Zofia Hansen’s “Open Form” architecture (1959) and their work in that period in Poland developing social housing and renewing public space. Pavilion Field Budapest is a tessellation of multiple audioworks from the Open Form Pavilion of Air series across the 6.25 hectares (250m x 250m) of II. János Pál pápa tér (Pope John Paul II Square), Budapest.

Each Pavilion audiowork is in a unique tuning system, the many sounds forming these acoustic architectures create the effect for listeners of physically changing how they hear the location and the surrounding sounds – profoundly reshaping spatial experience. The multiple Pavilion audioworks each present a different way to experience the Square’s audiosphere, its context. Pavilion Field Budapest has no visible presence outside the app and can only be accessed and enjoyed at the Square.

Using your smartphone, echoes.xyz app and headphones, visitors become participatory listeners – by traversing the Square, the choreography of your movements combines and changes sounds via the app, creating a unique composition. Made from many overlapping zones ('echoes'), each Pavilion is an invisible acoustic structure accessible via the app. Each zone’s sound draws on shapes informed by modernist architectural structures, like Xennakis’ 1958 Philips Pavilion and Budapest’s new Ethnographic Museum’s use of hyperbolic paraboloids. Together, in Pavilion Field Budapest, these shapes describe sonic forms - a porous acoustic architecture rather than a solid structure - creating an effect which subtly reframes your experience of the Square.

View of Pope JP II Square site and arrangement of works across the Pavilion Field Budapest - each of the designs shown in the map is colour-coded to the individual Pavilion audioworks shown further down the page. Each circle is one (aforementioned) "echo", a zone with a single architecturally-derived sound, with each design comprising from 7 (Berlevåg) to over 30 (Dublin) echoes - the complete design comprises over 100 sounds across the 9 audioworks forming the Pavilion Field.
 

Pavilion Field Budapest recalls Oskar and Zofia Hansen’s proposed Pavilion of Music design for Warsaw Autumn’s 1958 Festival. Their design would stretch across a public park in a unique way, incorporating speakers that allowed visitors to create personal spatial compositions as they moved through its Open Form architecture. Pavilion Field Budapest echoes the Hansens’ desire (as described here) for people to “move through the space, listening to the music with a heightened awareness of the natural setting beyond it”. Another writer concluded their Pavilion of Music’s use of “open forms had the potential to remind audiences of the fact of their own embodied being… [to] experiment with the ‘spatiality of music’… [to] shape their environment in meaningful ways… integrating sound with the listeners’ movements as well as with the trees and clouds’. Hansen’s aim was not the stimulation of sensation but of the imagination.”

Paviion Field Budapest, the Hansens' Pavilions and 'Open Form' architecture:

The Open Form Pavilion of Air audioworks parallel Hansen’s move to use the designs for the international fair pavilions as, in Krzysztof Kosciuczuk words in Frieze magazine “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 Open Form Pavilion of Air occurs at a variety of levels, among them the individual’s experience and apprehension of “space” i.e. location around them and its context.

Equally, as a spatial choreography through which listeners each move through on their own paths to compose their own piece through this movement, the Open Form Pavilion of Air echoes Oskar & Zofia Hansen’s pavilion for the 1958 Warsaw Autumn Music Festival which, Aleksandra Kedziorek observes "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 Open Form 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…

Furthermore, as Hansen commented during the Team 10 meetings in 1960 (as reported by Kedziorek) “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 Open Form 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. Hansen continues that, “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 Open Form Pavilion of Air combine and are combined by the listener’s movement to produce a gestalt effect that facilitates this shift in site-perception.

This RTÉ Culture primer gives more details on the structure of the individual Pavliion audioworks and the Open Form Pavilion of Air series.
 

INDIVIDUAL SITES IN THE 'OPEN FORM PAVILION OF AIR' SERIES:

Project background in previous sound/architectural works:
Open Form Pavilion of Air follows on from these previous selected architectural works:

- Climata (2015): recorded entirely in 15 of James Turrell’s skyspaces in 9 countries where each Skyspace was briefly transformed from an architectural light installation into a sound installation where you can hear the air move.
Climata was realized as an:

- SPECTRES (2019/20) - composed entirely of in-situ recordings with tone generators in 9 post-Communist architectures, it presents an interrogation of contemporary society across the threshold of the architecture from a former, but recent, epoch. SPECTRES was realized as an:

- Threshold Works No 17 (2021/22) – is a single 40minute multichannel work commissioned by the National Museum in Krakow (MNK) and permanent MNK collection acquisition. The work is presented as the entrance sound installation for MNK's permanent exhibition  ‘Sections: Gallery of Polish architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries’ ('Przekroje: Galeria Architektury Polskiej XX i XXI Wieku'). The installation was made using the resonances of the architecture of the bulidings of several branches of the MNK's buildings as a threshold, filter and frame for the city of Krakow, Watch an interview (in English and Polish) recorded at MNK's Hotel Cracovia branch about the project here.