The character of Miralles & Tagliabue’s design is set by the architects’ determination to embed The Hamburg Music School’s scheme within its existing buildings of the surrounding and tries to recognize the existing context. By connecting landscape and architecture and filling the resulting structure with color and light, the architects sought to express the energy and youth of the children and music who will use the school.

The site’s existing trees define the framework of the project, literally gets its character by intertwining with the architecture and continuing this landscape within the building itself, reading powerfully against the transparent facades of the building. These fragments of trees also shape the character of the school’s interior landscapes, dominating the views out and shaping details of the physical fabric. For example, the street elevation, for example, being supported on round pillars and beams designed to resemble arboreal fragments, standing as a metaphor for the trees outside of this building.

The Hamburg Music School is divided into two main parts: public area, comprising cafe and lecture rooms, and the private area, containing classrooms and administration area which for functional and acoustics reasons are located on different floors, connected by a common entrance hall that can also be used separately. The cafe opens to the yard and a ‘park’. The teachers’ room can be connected to this cafe. The administrative area is situated in the ground floor, with areas for information and public relations found close to the main entrance. The classrooms are in the first and second floor, in front of them there is a waiting zone ‘between’ the trees.

A construction of a series of ramps and different staircases leads from the entrance hall to the auditorium on the first floor. This link from the entrance to the second floor allows for a ceremonious procession for guests and offering an exuberant backdrop for public addresses. Facades are finished in red and yellow brickwork, with a steel and glass construction incorporating colored metal-panels forming elements of the street elevation.

As one of the main elements of this project, the landscape is continuously reinforced within the building, glass and steel panels wrap around existing trees, bricks firmly set within the earth echo towards the nearby school. Another important element is the inner concrete wall which is cladded for acoustic reasons with metal panels painted in bands of color with a similar idea of stripes in the outside facade. Introducing color to the facades could bring joy to the Hamburg Music School.

[Show as slideshow]