Thinking boundaries in the production of architecture and music

Where lies the boundary between music and architecture? Put in that way, the question makes us assume the existence of a boundary. That might seem self‐ evident – a boundary between two concepts is after all commonly demarcated by a definition: definio in Latin means to bound, set bounds to, limit, terminate, define. Boundaries are drawn to mark out property for the purposes of management and husbandry. Does it make sense to see architecture and music as owners of their own territory? Would such an approach not inevitably lead to border conflicts? Ludwig Wittgenstein advised us not to look at the formal definition of a word but rather to consider its actual use in our language. This essay is an attempt to answer that call. The position it takes is that the words architecture and music refer to specific relationships between the human body and its environment, and manage these relationships in the economy of our understanding. They do this by providing the discussion about certain processes and their products with a network of significance, a framework of concepts articulated against a conceptual field that constitutes our being‐human. Every instance of use has its origin in the same source: the person making use of something. But how are we to represent that framework of concepts? This essay explores the issue at the hand of the concepts tectonics, movement and rhythm. Nowadays we tend to think about meaning using different metaphors from those common during the Roman Empire: no longer as a partitioned landscape divided into lots and requiring border guards motivated by imperial ambitions, but as an intimately braided virtual network of coordinates plotting a complex surface of concepts with which people try to simulate reality so as to be able to use their body well in their environment. This model does not pretend to have reached any ultimate truth, it is a simulation of reality that appears to work. The pattern formed by the connections in this virtual network shows a certain cohesion from the point of view of a person who is directing his gaze outwards towards the world in which he lives: the perspective, for example, of my current view of architecture as a discipline, or the perspective of your earlier view of music, in which the various things crowding in on that view are related to one another and measured against one another in the play of a discussion. Seen on the basis of such a model, there does not need to be any boundary drawn between architecture and music: they constitute colourful strands within the braided continuity of human experience. Nevertheless they can, just like a territory, be mapped. But how? Architecture and music are produced in stages by the ordering of our environment in a design (the virtual space of the drawing or a composition), the performance (the real or actualised space of the design made into a building or the actual performance of a piece of music) and the experience of these, whereby the virtual and the real are attuned to each other in the representation of them. The point of view of the I leads the way in this process, by drawing things together. In discussions with others, I discipline the words used in order to bring out my meaning. Music, before it is anything else, is a word able to shape a discussion by relating a special set of relationships between body and environment and thereby determining them in their significance. The sentence this is architecture or