International Competitions in Architecture
A HOUSE FOR FREDERIC CHOPIN
Dizzy, yes, dizzy of melancholia (as regressive rapture) Chopin makes us...!
It is difficult not to cry (destined for dissolution, longingly), when a Polonaise is played...!
And all of this because of the mad(dening) music that Chopin composed, mad(dening) because TOO FULL OF SOUL!!! Not that this was / is a bad thing...! Far from it! But so very uncommon!
When the piano met him, the piano learned to lament and exult and cry and whisper and sing and dance in such sublime, piercingly kind (if we can say so) forms that it didn't regain its conscience ever since! It is our belief that after Chopin the piano was simply not the same, whatever other composers might say or might have said...!
We ask you to be ROMANTIC like never before, dear architect! It is true, it is not Autumn now, the proper season for romanticism, yet, the gray of the skies, in some parts of the world, the cold weather, and the expectancy of Spring make us believe and hope, yes hope, that suffering (understood as an enhancement of feelings and as a creative springboard) is still possible, that romantic longing is still possible and that Chopin's piano music is as adequate for expressing unfashionable feelings as it always was...!
So we ask you to design A HOUSE FOR FREDERIC CHOPIN, now that we are approaching the day of his 200th birthday!
Can we transform our building into a piano and / or a piano into a building...?
Can we transform it into a Nocturne or a Polonaise, or viceversa...?
If there ever was the chance to envision a flying building, this is it! Fly! Fly together with the house for a great musician!
Design a house for someone who, in the words of George Sand, was more Polish than Poland itself! But at his most nationalistic he became, paradoxically, universal! Yes, he was so intensely Polish that he became ALL OF US!!! His soul was and is, OURS!
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