Architecture is frozen music
Imagine the following scenario. There are some problems with it, but you will get the point.
The Berlin Philharmonic has the only sheet music for Mozart's Requiem. One day, a fire destroys the last 10 pages.
Angela Merkel announces that the National Treasure will be restored within 3 years, before the World Music Festival in Berlin in 2023.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung proposes that Philip Glass rewrite the ending in a minimalist style appropriate for our time.
A Philarmonic employee discloses that the orchestra has a xerox copy of the hand-written score. But professors at the Hochschule für Musik Köln point out that Antonio Salieri finished the Requiem after Mozart's death and say that we need a modern Salieri. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung agrees and mentions Jay-Z and Taylor Swift, among others.
One of the problems with the analogy is that no one wants Jay-Z to rewrite Mozart’s Requiem, even though we can all agree that he’s a musical genius. Another is that we have no Modern architects who are as “accessible” as Jay-Z and Taylor Swift.
“Architecture is frozen music,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, but musicians and architects work differently.
