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Requiem for Architecture is part of a performance series that looks at the civilized world from a pigeon's mask. Alongside an opera singer and a pigeon choir cooing the German national anthem in a kind of funeral march, an oversized inflated pigeon occupies the Elbphilharmonie's forecourt.

The Elbphilharmonie is a monument of European high culture - a temple of listening. But it is not only a magnet for human audiences: due to its external appearance, which closely resembles steep coastal cliffs, pigeons are instinctively attracted.

With its completion, every building, no matter how monumental, has reached its zenith and is subject to the natural process of decay. The common city pigeon is considered the messenger and executor of decay, which is why a pigeon repellent system - an acoustic weapon - is installed on the plaza of the Elbphilharmonie: by means of a high-frequency sound, pigeons are kept away from the Elbphilharmonie. Man marks his territory as final architecture. 

The cooing of the pigeon becomes here the aria of a symbolic requiem for this architecture.