The revered publication Architects Journal headlined a feature ‘Swiss Expo shames Dome failings’. Intended to occur approximately every 40 years, Swiss Expo is a project in the public domain and yet staged without Lottery funding. Which begs the question - is free money a curse or a kindness?
Look at what else has been in these pages of late: The Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, the Pageant of the Horse, the Commonwealth Games and the Jubilee concerts at Buckingham Palace - all without Lottery money and all successfully realized. These examples have, of course, all received finance from the commercial sector, but without the political interference which afflicted the Dome. Pardon my oversimplification, but commercial enterprise doesn’t release these funds with less strings than the Lottery, but they’re better able to make decisions about value for money than politicos. That doesn’t make it easy - indeed, as a case in point, Expo in Switzerland has been particularly tortuous, leading to the total replacement of all officials just 18 months prior to opening, but ultimately it worked and was successful.
Success, as opposed to finance, is a matter of substance; the National Centre for Pop Music springs to mind - arguably more funding would have helped here, but it was the paucity of content that was its ultimate undoing. So what made Expo interesting enough that this solely national, rather than international, exhibition attracted visitor numbers in excess of the entire Swiss population?
Herein lay two examples from Expo, each so disparate in concept as to have emerged from distinct species - one a remarkable experiment in sound which seduced the populace of Biel, its surroundings, and eventually Switzerland, the other a more familiar ‘themed experience’, but so well executed as to be equally seductive . . .
The Sound Tower
The ‘Klangturm’ or Sound Tower as it directly translates, is essentially an ambient sound environment established within a 40m tall tower designed by leading architects Coop Himmelb(l)au of Austria - the parenthetic ‘l’ being a linguistic pun making the name literally ‘Blue Heaven’ (oh, how we laughed in the Gasthaus). One of the many ‘outsiders’ the Swiss organizers invited to contribute to the Expo, Himmelb(l)au’s structure resembles nothing less than the cooling tower of a power station. With its intended ambient noise interior, people of the town of Biel, where it was to be located, not to mention the wider populace of Switzerland, could be forgiven for not being wholeheartedly enthusiastic about this concept.
‘Antagonistic’ might be more the emotion. I spoke with Daniel Meyer of audio installers M&M Hire AG to discover exactly what was going on here, and why it inspired so much passion. "Andreas Bosshard’s concept was to take the idea that we gain the majority of our information through visual means - we go to the museum, we go to the cinema, we go to the shops - we go to all those places to ‘see’ something. He wanted to create a place where people go to ‘hear’ something."
That seems all well and good, but how would this be realised?
"Within the tower are three distinct rings of speakers, spiralling up to the top. These allow operators to move sound around, vertically and horizontally." It should be explained that a variety of 30 speakers from German manufacturer d&b audiotechnik are arrayed around the tower, each individually controllable using separate amplifiers, via a matrix of two Yamaha DME32 digital mixing engines. "Andreas likes a natural sound, but he also has a passion for indirect sound. The d&b speakers are perfect for him: no EQ is required and despite using boxes here from three distinct ranges, they all have exactly comparable ch
