(This image is a Wikipedia image and licensed under Creative Commons) This building is luminous inside and out.
Entering on the first floor via an external stair that was wide, light and strangely lacking in pomposity at the main entrance, the 100million euros construction budget does not so much shout as glows. The stairs were also slippery when wet but once inside, the aluminium floors and stairs, the fair-faced concrete with inset signage in over-sized alphabets, the frameless glass balustrades, the stainless steel handrails; even the perforated metal sheets forming wall panels and ceiling half concealing services and an inset aluminium handrails, take over. Perhaps it's the lack of any seams, or protruding ones at least, that gives the interior such an aura. Or it might be the many shades and sheens of gray in a interior that leans this way and that; and which extends in multiple directions in different volumes that wows enough for one to forget snagging. Nevertheless, the glow beckons and I feel myself following (moth to flame or does Rem's assertion that gray spaces make people want to move on while brighter, bolder colours make people stay, actually supported empirically?)
That luminosity is amazing especially as a second look at the photographic evidence of the same interiors reveal the crudeness of the construction and the expanse of building innards and services on display. Is OMA relying on the spectacular to discredit the requirement of the spatial and the tectonic for architecture to exist? Or Lars Spuybroek's (or was it Kas Oosterhius') division of contemporary architecture practice as Conceptual/ Formal/ Technological-Constructional practices more applicable here as a filter to understand OMA's rendition of a musical experience?
All in - my brief experience of Porto's musical box was rather magical.
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