Opening of Klanghaus Toggenburg

On 23 May, the Klanghaus in Toggenburg opens to the public. Since the competition phase in 2010, Vogt Landscape Architects, together with Meili, Peter & Partner, have been involved in the project, developing the landscape and access, with Staufer & Hasler Architects joining the planning team in 2012. The Klanghaus is a place where different rooms overlap: the landscape, the acoustic, and the architectural. These layers vary in their transience. The relation between sound and landscape is extended to a triangle by the incorporation of architecture. Conceived as an open music laboratory, the Klanghaus enables encounters between musicians from the world of natural sound and other genres in an international workshop for experimental collaboration.

The landscape concept is not a design concept in the classical sense. The precise localisation of the building in the landscape is one of the project's key qualities. The reciprocal relationship between nature and culture inherent in the Klanghaus, between the landscape as a resonance space and a sensual counterpart to the musician, does not require a designed environment or an intermediate space between nature and the building in the form of a garden. On the contrary, it requires the immediacy of integrating the Klanghaus into the soundscape of nature, the whirring of the falcon, the babbling of the brook, which surround this place on all sides without separation.

Project Page

Map: Siegfriedkarte, site plan: VOGT