With Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, Anish Kapoor is designing a mobile 700-seat concert hall to bring music and the performing arts to the areas of northern Japan devastated by the earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. Kapoor will design the shell of the building, a "pneumatic structure" made of an elastic material such as PVC that can be erected quickly by inflating it with air.
Entitled Ark Nova, the project is being sponsored by the Swiss bank UBS, but organisers hope to find additional supporters for each performance so that attendance can be free. An artistic committee which includes conductors Claudio Abbadio and Daniel Barenboim, Chinese pianist Lang Lang and Japanese cellist Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi and others has been set up to plan the programming, which is due to begin in Spring 2012.
