ZADAR’S SEA ORGAN

Croatian architect Nikola Bašić’s 2005 musical creation has just one moving part, but it’s a big one: the Adriatic Sea. Tasked with visually transforming part of a monotonous concrete seawall around the port city of Zadar, Bašić created a series of seven wide steps leading up from about 230 feet of the oceanfront. Beneath each step are five large tubes of different lengths and as the tide rises and falls, it pushes or pulls air through the 35 tubes, sounding the whistle inside each one.

The sounds are emitted through a row of small apertures on the front of the top step. Some listeners say the sounds remind them of whale songs but, in fact, the chords produced were modeled on the close harmony klapa vocal music of the Dalmatian region in southern Croatia where Zadar is located. Bašić’s Sea Organ won the prestigious European Prize for Urban Public Space design in 2006.

See the Sea Organ at youtube.com/watch?v=pShgrfYdhrs