David Byrne Plays The Building

By Nick Pinto
POSTED MAY 13, 2008

David Byrne has a new musical instrument. It’s 99 years old, made of steel with a resonant hollow body, and enormous. That is to say, it takes up a significant chunk of the southern tip of Manhattan.

The instrument Byrne is working with is the Battery Maritime Building, a massive beaux-arts building next to the Staten Island Ferry terminal. Originally a busy station for East River ferries, the building has been unoccupied for decades, except for its recent use as the departure point for visitors to Governor’s Island.

Byrne, the former frontman for the New York band the Talking Heads, will be using the building for his new music installation, “Playing the Building,” which opens May 31, the same day that ferry service to Governors Island begins, and continues to run on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays until August 10 from noon to 6 p.m.

At a press conference May 12, Byrne described the installation and showed reporters around the hall where it will be placed.

“As many new Yorkers are well aware, buildings make noises, whether it’s the radiator or the pipes or the upstairs neighbor or creaking superstructures,” Byrne said. “In an old building like this one with a lot of metal superstructure, there’s a lot of potential for sound-making. You can vibrate some of the girders; you can blow air through the plumbing and get sounds like a giant flute; you can strike the metal pillars and get a sound like a giant gong or a small gong.”

In order to play the building, Byrne will be connecting a variety of devices attached to different parts of the second-floor waiting hall to the keyboard of an antique pump-organ. The sounds of the building, arranged in order of pitch, will be triggered by visitors sitting at the keyboard.

Byrne tried to downplay the shadow his fame casts over the installation, calling the concept for the piece so obvious as to hardly be an idea at all.

“It’s not a performance by me,” he said. “It’s not an artwork or a thing you go in and look at. It’s a thing the public plays and gets involved in.”

As such, Byrne said, it is an equal-opportunity experience.

“No one is better at doing it or playing it than anyone else. It’s not something musicians are good at and non-musicians are not good at.”

Since rising to fame in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Byrne has branched out in recent years to a wide variety of other art forms. He undertook a project similar to the upcoming “Playing the Building” three years ago in a former factory in Sweden. The idea to bring the project to New York started a year later. It has taken the intervening time for Byrne and Creative Time—a non-profit organization that brings art to public spaces in the city—to negotiate the proper permits and permissions from the city.

Disused for decades, the Battery Maritime Building is unlikely to remain empty for long. Developers plan to convert the top floors of the building to a luxury hotel, building a four-story glass addition on the roof. Last winter the plans won support from both Community Board 1 and the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

In the meantime, Byrne’s project makes a perfect compliment to the cavernous upper hall, with its ornate architectural details and baroquely flaking paint.

“It’s a very Victorian, old-style kind of Rube Goldberg contraption,” Byrne said of the apparatus. “No microphones, no electronics, no speakers. All the sounds come from the sounds the buildings make.”

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