The pavillion, first designed for Manchester in 2009, will be erected inside the Gasometer at the Westergasfabriek

British architect Zaha Hadid has created the perfect space for Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. She designed an open pavilion that is put into an existing space, a fluid spiral of billowing sails that envelops the audience and performers. ‘As in a cocoon’, says Hadid. ‘After all, Bach wrote his music for the intimacy of the salons.’ During the Holland Festival the pavilion will be set up in the Gashouder at the Westergasfabriek. As well as three Bach solo concerts, the festival will stage a programme with contemporary music by Calliope Tsoupaki, Rozalie Hirs and Frederik Croene, amongst others. Visitors can also enjoy lunchtime performances and guided tours around the pavilion.

Numerous prominent soloists, including the cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, inaugurated the installation; Queyras and the Bach pavilion will travel to the Holland Festival 2010 for performances of four of Bach’s six cello suites. The pavilion – a modern version of the kind of intimate salon where an 18th-century listener might have listened to Bach’s intimate and often complex music – will be erected inside the Gashouder at the Westergasfabriek and holds just 192 lucky people.

The performance space is demarcated and enclosed by a single, deep ribbon of fabric, which floats out of a back corner of the space like a waterfall and snakes around until it finally curls around the audience to the floor. It is a sort of visual answer to Bach’s ingenious proportions, and like the music for which it is intended, the pavilion is dynamic in its polyphony of spatial forms. The original space where it is placed is divided and moulded, creating breathing spaces that criss-cross and flow into one another. The fabric is an extremely stretchy white Lycra stretched over a steel frame; the ribbon is itself a floating sculpture, a flexible architectural motif and creates a temporary space that invites the listener to enter it. ‘It is almost like being in a cocoon,’ Hadid says of the curving, enveloping forms. ‘You are perhaps more enclosed than in a standard, rectangular concert hall, but in a soft way.’
The acoustics of a space designated for music-making is crucial: it should be neither too echoey nor too dry. An important element of the design process was to investigate possible forms of the installation and the materials to be used to construct it. Hadid’s architects have worked closely with acousticians: Mark Howarth and Michael Whitcroft, of Manchester-based Sandy Brown Associates, tested different versions of the design in scale-model versions and suggested adjustments accordingly. The ribbon is made of lightweight synthetic fabric, supported by a metal skeleton. The flowing, sensual form spreads the sound evenly around the space and prevents undesirable reverberations. Special panels woven into the fabric reflect the sound towards the audience without affecting the space’s warm resonance.Zaha Hadid is an English architect of Iraqi origin. Her most well-known completed designs include the Mind Zone of the Millennium Dome in London (1999), Ski Jump in Innsbruck (2002) and the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati (2003). In 1972, she began her studies at the Architectural Association in London, which she finished in 1977 by receiving the Diploma Award. After that, she became a partner of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and taught at the Architectural Association, where she headed up her own studio until 1987. Since then she has held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and the Sullivan Chair at the School of Architecture of the University of Illinois, Chicago. In addition, she has had guest professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, the Knolton School of Architecture in Ohio and the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York. In 2004, she was Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University. Currently she is professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria.
Hadid has been appointed Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture, and in 2002, Commander of the British Empire. Various important festivals and museums have dedicated exhibitions to her drawings and paintings, including the Guggenheim in New York, the MoMA in New York, the Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt and the Venice Architecture Biennale. Her work has received countless awards, including Gold Medal Architectural Design 1982, the Austrian National Award for Architecture 2002, the Mies van der Rohe Award 2003, the Blueprint Award for Architect of the Year 2004, and the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2004.