Architectures of Sound

209 Pages·2017·22.706 MB·English

Architectures of Sound
RESEARCH_Fowler_Architectures_of_Sound_INHALT_170918.indd 1 18.09.17 11:08
RESEARCH_Fowler_Architectures_of_Sound_INHALT_170918.indd 2 18.09.17 11:08
Michael Fowler
Architectures of Sound
Acoustic Concepts and Parameters for Architectural Design
Birkhäuser
Basel
RESEARCH_Fowler_Architectures_of_Sound_INHALT_170918.indd 3 18.09.17 11:08
RESEARCH_Fowler_Architectures_of_Sound_INHALT_170918.indd 4 18.09.17 11:08
8
Introduction
14
Prelude
14 Sounding City
24
Chapter 1: An Architecture of the Ear
24 Organs of hearing
28 Membranes
37 Vibrations
44
Chapter 2: On Auditory Scale
44 Boxes
55 Dimensions
63 Continuum
68
Chapter 3: Dumb Holes and the Acoustic Horizon
68 Grid
73 Form
76 Materiality
81 Program
85 Texture
89 Structure
93 Hole
98
Chapter 4: The Taxonomy of a Meta-theory
98 Sound-space
100 Aural architecture
105 Soundscape
111 Critical listening
RESEARCH_Fowler_Architectures_of_Sound_INHALT_170918.indd 5 18.09.17 11:08
RESEARCH_Fowler_Architectures_of_Sound_INHALT_170918.indd 6 18.09.17 11:08
120
Chapter 5: Re-hearing Icons of Architecture I.
120 Notation
124 Tuning
128 Pause / Play
136 Ad infinitum
146
Chapter 6: Re-hearing Icons of Architecture II.
146 Continuous
152 Above
157 Discontinuous
164
Chapter 7: Acoustic Futures
164 Sound house
167 Sound plan
171 Order
180
Chapter 8: “Like Quail Clucking . . .”
186
Postlude
186 Wang’s Dream
193
Bibliography
201
Picture Credits
RESEARCH_Fowler_Architectures_of_Sound_INHALT_170918.indd 7 18.09.17 11:08
Introduction
This is a book about ideas. It is about architecture too, though most of all, it is a book
about sound and listening and how these concepts might change our notions of the
experience of the built environment. The lens through which these elements are exam-
ined and interrogated is the meta-theory of critical listening. As a framework, critical
listening might best be described as an approach to reading sound. But it is also a the-
ory about the simulation of acoustic space, not through direct digital computational
means, but rather through the development of an informed and constructive auditory
imagination. It is a means thus in which to read the relationship between architec tural
environments and the ways in which they curate and compose particular acoustic sig-
natures. Consequently, it is a book that is just as much about modes of listening as it is
about ways of reading sound-space.
As a way in which to engage in this type of auditory imagining, and from the
pedagogical standpoint of starting from zero, Architectures of Sound is bookended
by two related short stories. Both are musically inspired, and thus are what I have
called a Prelude and a Postlude. But rather than seeking merely to place the book into a
non-standard or superficially novel state, these two paired chapters of science fiction
are used in what the composer and theorist R. Murray Schafer may have called an “ear
cleansing” process. These short chapters, “Sounding City” and “Wang’s Dream,” track
how a protagonist, Wang, encounters and understands an acoustic environment of a
future megacity.
But instead of attempting to describe a wholly unknown acoustic world of the
future as a character that in itself might draw us away from the situation of our own
“contemporary” acoustic environment, the idea of the Prelude and Postlude is to begin
and end the argument of the book proper: that is, that architecture and the built envi-
ronment greatly impact the way in which we experience sounds.
Hearing then is at the core of the initial jump into the unknown of what Architec-
tures of Sound engages in. But instead of simply describing or formally defining hearing
or its related and sometimes confusing partner, listening, both the Prelude and Postlude
seek to center and highlight what might be understood as “critical” when we speak of
hearing or listening. The first ear cleansing then of “Sounding City” is an attempt to not
simply describe sound and the auditory experience in absolute terms, but moreover,
to question the what, why and how of auditory phenomena. I see these bookends then
as extremely important because they are a means by which to engage and open the
imagination to new types of auditory consequences. In short, to be a critical listener is
perhaps simply that: not simply to observe the auditory environment as a passive at-
tendant, but to go further and actively discover what influences, structures and states
perpetuate such qualities of our sounding environment.
The role of architecture within this type of method is of course extremely rele-
vant and important. Most of us today live in a built environment, an environment that
has design elements, landscapes, planning regulations, aesthetic and developmental
concerns, not to mention ecological and sustainable strategies written directly into
law. Sounds live there too, but moreover, they are fundamentally affected by these
approaches to the design and maintenance of the built environment. The first propo-
8
RESEARCH_Fowler_Architectures_of_Sound_INHALT_170918.indd 8 18.09.17 11:08
sition of Architectures of Sound is to thus imagine (critically) what a building would be
if it could be described as an ear, as a device for listening? “An Architecture of the Ear,”
the first chapter proper, is one that posits that the methods, function, geometry and
site of the human ear can be consequently imagined as a type of architecture. But this
architecture is also a series of characteristics that can be consequently assigned and
understood within the context of the built environment, and of design. If the facade of
the building is the interface between the outside and the inside, it is also a potential
listening device that through its form, porosity and temporality enables modes of lis-
tening to occur both exterior and interior to its program.
Following on from this initial investigation comes the notion of how we can a ccount
for scale in terms of listening experience. While for Le Corbusier or Étienne-Louis
Boullée the objective relation between the architectonic and the human physical di-
mension becomes a defining metric, auditory experience and the sense of what is large
and small is a more complex and indeed subjective matter to contend with. The chapter
“On Auditory Scale” therefore establishes a continuum between two extreme rooms,
the anechoic chamber (complete absorption) and the reverberation chamber (com-
plete reflection). Scale acts as a pivot between the acoustic qualities, geometry and
di mension of a space as gauged against its auditory qualities and characteristics. This
approach is supported in part through John Cage’s most famous encounter at the an -
echoic chamber at Harvard in the 1950s, which consequently led to his silent piece 4’33”.
But rather than drawing wholly on Cage’s iconoclastic aesthetics of musical upheaval,
it provides a suitable foil for reading how philosopher Michel Serres hears the world as
a super fluous series of interconnected boxes originating at the ear.
But if the question of what auditory scale is can be induced from a more critical
lens or mode of listening, the pragmatics of how such scales can be defined in architec-
tural terms remains unknown. The chapter “Dumb Holes and the Acoustic Horizon”
thus sets out to explore the main argument of the meta-theory of critical listening.
By examining numerous projects by various architects from Bernhard Leitner, NOX,
Hodgetts + Fung Design, OMA, etc., a series of theoretical concepts is explored that,
when considered as an assemblage, assists in describing the very dimensions by which
the auditory experience is defined through the architectonic articulation of space. By
examining, (re)defining and theorizing on the auditory implications of the facets of
texture, form, materiality, structure and program, a new series of fundamentals is
under stood in relation to the physical properties of architecture and the built environ-
ment. Though some of these facets are already known and defined within architectural
praxis, they are used here in particular orbits and definitions as a means to tease out
the auditory within architecture.
In addition to these explorations of what the assemblage of facets means for defin-
ing the dimensions of auditory scale, the chapter seeks also from its outset to call into
account the notion of what an acoustic horizon and acoustic arena are. As two concepts
that become ephemerally generated through the facets of texture, form, materiality,
structure and program, the difference between the acoustic horizon and the acoustic
arena can be readily abstracted into the emphasis on either the position of the sound
n
o
source or the listener. Naturally both points of view have significance for the built en- cti
u
vironment, but what is emphasized within “Dumb Holes and the Acoustic Horizon” is d
o
the utility of reading anthropologist Tim Ingold’s concept of the i nterconnectedness ntr
I
9
RESEARCH_Fowler_Architectures_of_Sound_INHALT_170918.indd 9 18.09.17 11:08