KAUNAS M.K. ČIURLIONIS CONCERT CENTRE

Location: Kaunas, Lithuania
Type: International Competition, Semi-Finalist
Structure: Concrete structure clad with oxidized slate shingles
Year: 2017
Team: Ben James, Alihan Oney, Angela Huang, Alexander Tahinos, Joseph Giampietro, Mor Segal, Yang Li, Yi Zhu

The Repetition of the Double

The M.K. Čiurlionis Concert Centre competition brief set an agenda that was both speculative to future developments and respectful to the history of the local culture. This duality continued in the requirement for two performance halls: one traditionally balanced in its acoustics and display, the other for experimental reconfigurations. The site also contains a conflict as the building is located on the industrial side of the river—near concrete plants, warehouses, and factories—yet is across the Nemunas river and clearly connected to the UNESCO historic city of Kaunas. These dualities reflect the conflicting desires occurring within many complex building projects and provided the background for our proposal.

Our design attempts to activate these tensions by splitting the project into a series of doubles. At one level, it is literally two buildings, one for each performance space. It also has two radically different visual presences; one for the industrial street and one for the picturesque river views. The exterior is clad in two differing materials that invert from roof to wall between the two buildings. One material is reclaimed slate tiles patina through the processes of time, the other is a cast concrete, artificially imprinted with a rough stone grain. These material expressions are applied throughout the mass flipping from roof to base at the moment the buildings touch. These appear as solid objects from the industrial road, however, on the river side the solidity is sliced by planes of glass that transform the chunky masses into abstract figures of indeterminate scale and material. These windows are a highly reflective dichroic glass, creating iconic reflective figures during the day and floating apparitions of light by night. The sharp cuts transform the aesthetics of the solid material mass, a technique influenced by the sculpture of Ken Price and Isamu Noguchi, an aesthetic conflict between raw physical materiality and the ephemerality of a flat abstract image.

The principal arrival is through an entry court between the two buildings. This entry sequence passes under the moment where the two buildings touch, framing a view to the river and city beyond. Upon passing through this arch, the character of the building transforms into an open embrace of the river site and a terraced landscape. This river court is formed by the tall glass facades on two sides, a grand entry stair and outdoor performance space stepping down to the river. The steep pitched roofs of the historic city are alluded to both in the slate material cladding and the graphic figures reflecting through the glass cuts.