Fabric ceiling transforms a school gym

Arcus Temporum XI, a three-day spiritual exercise August, 2012, blended music, theater and art, focusing on the theme “a search for place.” The festival site, the Arch Abbey of Pannonhalma, Hungary, is a historic monument with a breathtaking view of Lake Balaton—and a boarding school gym that served as a concert hall for guest composers. Architects transformed the spacious gym into floating layers of fabric that concealed the utilitarian, enhanced the acoustics.

The system of moving, translucent polypropylene nonwoven geotextile fabric panels and a geometric grid of point lights conceal the
gym’s beams and walls. “The hanging ribs [acted] by damping the sharp reflecting sounds and dispersing them through space,” according to the architects, Dániel Baló, Dániel Eke, István Varga and Zoltán Kalászi, students at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.