Pavilion Field Budapest - II. János Pál pápa tér (Pope John Paul II Square)

An Open Form Pavilion of Air is a suspended 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 collection of 9 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. Each of the 9 Pavilion audioworks 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. Traversing Pope John Paul II Square gives a constantly shifting series of audio experiences specific to each Pavilion's sonic footprint, similar to walking through a series of adjacent Big Top marquees – together they describe a constellation of impossible architectures, a fantastical architectural canopy of sound.

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 at link 1 below) for people to “move through the space, listening to the music with a heightened awareness of the natural setting beyond it”. Another writer (at link 2 below) 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.”

See info at https://www.recordedfields.net/installations/pavilion-field-budapest/

This RTÉ Culture primer on the Pavilion series gives additional details https://www.rte.ie/culture/2023/0327/1366079-new-music-dublin-welcomes-you-to-the-open-form-pavilion-of-air/

Link 1 - https://kadebeem.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/caroline_claus_urban_sound_design_process.pdf#page=11 Link 2 - https://monoskop.org/images/2/21/Crowley_David_Muzyczuk_Daniel_Sounding_the_Body_Electric_Experiments_in_Art_and_Music_in_Eastern_Europe_1957-1984.pdf#page=29