New Signal on an Old Hill: Weaving Music into Spatial Experience | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025

Teufelsberg, once a Cold War listening post in Berlin, is a hill layered with forgotten signal—encrypted messages, lost transmissions, and the static of surveillance. This project weaves music into architecture, composing a new spatial signal across the hill. Using live instruments, motion capture, and audio analysis, music becomes the generative force. Melody, rhythm, and harmony are translated into building components. The conductor’s gestures moderate and shape the flow, guiding the emotional tone. Architecture unfolds like a score, layered, spiralling, and alive. Voxels grow from musical data. Circulation mimics chord progression, rising toward a rooftop panorama of Berlin. Historic fragments are reused and reinterpreted: the radome structure is preserved, while recycled cladding forms a new breathing skin. Inside, an unconventional exhibition gallery awaits, interactive instruments and installations invite visitors to compose their own spatial music. This is not static space, it is architecture woven from music, emotions, and experience.

Imagine Music as Space Inspired by music theory and Jorinde Voigt’s drawings, this experiment turns sound into space. Emotion replaces logic as music shapes floating forms within a rigid grid, stitching fragments into rhythm.

Space as Music Sheet: Architect as Band Music notes are mapped into a voxel grid. Frequency shapes height and loudness defines area. Gestures refine the form. Elements from different instruments interlock like voices in a composition, forming a unified spatial score.

The Song of Voxels From signal to structure, music becomes a cloud of voxels: gathering, rising, forming a spatial score. Anchored to Teufelsberg’s broken terrain, it fills voids and layers new rhythms over the past.

Weaving the Circulation Layered like chords and linked by progression, each level is a phrase, each path a modulation. The exploded diagram shows spiralling circulation and stacked programs.

Experiencing the Song The architecture unfolds as a rhythmic journey: open and enclosed, light and shadow, tension and release. Each render captures a melodic step, guiding visitors like a walking score.

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