The 599 Music School occupies a converted property in Delhi, a project that required thinking about architecture in relation to acoustics: how a room receives sound, how it holds it, and how it releases it. The challenge was not to make a technically neutral box but to create spaces that feel deliberately tuned, where the act of playing or listening is supported by what surrounds it.
Teaching rooms are sized and proportioned for different ensembles, from solo practice to small chamber groups. Each room has a distinct acoustic character, determined partly by geometry and partly by the surface treatments chosen, timber battens, acoustic panels integrated into the joinery, and materials selected for their relationship to sound as much as to sight.
Common spaces, entrance, waiting, corridor, are treated with equal care. The school is an institution, and the building should feel like one: serious without being austere, considered without being precious.
"We were designing for the ear as much as the eye, which turned out to require much of the same things: proportion, material honesty, and the absence of noise."