This paper explores the potentiality for remolding the way of teaching and learning architectural design through proposing an experimental and cross-disciplinary approach to be developed between music and architecture. By introducing music as a conceptual device, a series of relational, temporal, and perceptual mechanisms that we encountered in musical experience are to be implemented in articulating the experiential aspects of our understanding of space and architecture. An experimental design studio will be presented to exemplify the process, method, and skills required and developed in the course of establishing the grounding for transferring the insights of one discipline to the other.

As Bernhard Leitner tried to remind us in his Le Cylinder Sonore that the music of the past was, according to John Cage, “dealing with conceptions and their communication, but the new music being created has nothing to do with the communication of the concept, only to do with perception” (Martin 1994, p.30), the development of contemporary music seeks to free music from the burden of representation and focuses on the perceptual dimension of our musical experience. The attempt not only directly challenges our understanding of the art of music but also inspires us to reconsider the validity and adequacy of Goethe’s metaphor of seeing architecture as frozen music. By reflecting upon this ancient metaphor and extending the inquiry of its authenticity in philosophical and educational context, potentially we will be able to reshuffle the traditional conception of architecture which could eventually and correspondingly reshape the route and mode of learning architecture and architectural design.