The project of an inflatable concert hall, which could be easily transported from place to place, appeared in August 2011. Its authors, architect Arata Isozaki and sculptor Anish Kapoor, developed it on behalf of the organizers of the Lucerne Music Festival, who conceived to create a mobile object for holding in it cultural events in various cities of Japan after the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, which killed thousands of people.
The project became a “helping hand” for the hardest hit by the disaster in the Tohoku region on the island of Honshu - part of a program to restore cultural infrastructure there and a gesture of moral support for residents. The temporary concert hall was named Ark Nova, which means "New Ark". Arata Isozaki, talking about the project, said that he turned to the image of the Old Testament because Ark Nova, like Noah's Ark, should become a symbol of hope for a happy life in the world after the disaster.
The first concert in the "Ark" was scheduled for May 2012, but the implementation was delayed, and only at the end of September 2013 in the Japanese town of Matsushima, music was heard for the first time in an inflatable hall: the Lucerne Festival Ark Nova was opened by Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who held a music master class for children of local residents. The program also included performances by symphony and jazz orchestras, rock musicians and kabuki theater (each type of performance has its own configuration of seats and stages).
The Ark Nova Concert Hall is a huge, oval, streamlined room formed by an air-filled, elastic, purple PVC-coated polyester membrane. Its design uses Kapoor's idea, which he first embodied in an object.
Leviathan at the Paris Grand Palais in 2011: no frame is needed for such a structure, it is supported by a “hand” brought into the interior, which is also part of the membrane. The result is a hall for 500 people with dimensions of 36 x 30 x 18 meters.
The unique hall was brought to the festival in Matsushima in a truck - to inflate and then dismantle it is as easy as putting an air mattress in a suitcase after a vacation, so Ark Nova is planned to be used for concerts in different parts of Tohoku. Of course. there are also disadvantages here: because of the membrane material and the shape of the hall, acoustics suffers (although the oval configuration with a "hand" is still better than the spherical shape natural for such buildings). But here, too, we managed to get out of the situation: Yasuhisa Toyota from Nagata Acoustics developed special acoustic panels for the “ark” from local cedar, which after the tsunami turned into dead wood. The seats for the spectators are made of the same material.
Due to constant natural disasters, Japanese architectural tradition is rich in ideas for temporary buildings. You don't have to go far for examples: now in Moscow, in Gorky Park, for almost a year there has been an exhibition pavilion with cardboard columns of Shigeru Bana, known for his pre-fabricated objects made from scrap materials for force majeure situations. But even to erect its cardboard structures, it takes more time than to inflate the Ark Nova hall before the next concert.
