architectural space / Musical approaches to space
In his lecture Atmospheres, Peter Zumthor describes nine architectonic aspects of his work.6 The third aspect concerns ‘the sound of a space’. He describes interiors as large instruments that collect sound, amplify it and diffuse it to other places. The intrinsic acoustic quality of the space depends on the shape of the space and the way that materials are used. In this way, every space makes its own sound. There are many buildings with their own fantastic and valuable sound that makes you feel at home. Finally, he remembers the intimate, familiar sounds of his childhood: creaking floors, wind over the rooftop, the sound of his mother in the kitchen. Zumthor’s space is an intimate, protective place where you can be yourself. Where you can feel safe, where you know not only the colours, textures and smells, but also the sounds. A specific space for a specific use, for a specific user and at a specific spot. Designing such places is about intuitively recognizing specific characteristics, about the craft of translating these into space with the right materials and put together in the right way. It is a design approach that is reflected in the resulting building, not literally, not in image, but tucked away in the tectonics, the material and the atmosphere of the structure.
Discovering space In every project, the students explore and design space with intrinsic, unique qualities. Sound is the catalyst for the design, but touch, light, shadow and orientation also have a meaning. It is space that comes from a process of listening, creating, anticipating and reflecting, from a need to make sound a real part of the design, and to make the visual image the result of an auditory and sensual exploration. Thus the image is only a result instead of a goal in the design process. Not surprisingly, it generates images that we do not yet know, ones that surprise us. Sound artist Brandon LaBelle points this out in oase 78: ‘If sound and architecture have more to offer one another than strictly acoustics, then it is perhaps in the area of adding ambiguity to the strictly functional and spatial program of architecture. What excites me about this is the suggestion that if architecture works with sound such that the placement of acoustic installations come first, it has the benefit of breaking down many of its assumptions and considers sound by its own specifications. I believe that would generate something that does not resemble much of what we’ve come to know in architecture.’7 In all these designs, formal meaning moves to the background. This means that we must also look at them with different eyes. These are therefore design results not only to observe, but also to feel, discover, listen to and smell. Juhani Pallasmaa writes about the measurable and indefinite in the Poetics of Space. More than only providing physical protection, a building must also have a soul that can be felt by all the senses together.8 This reaches to the core of architecture. Each design has the goal of coming alive through people, who must therefore make architecture their own, and also vice versa: the architecture must win people over. That requires more than a good-looking space. All the senses play a role, certainly also listening.
6 Peter Zumthor. Atmospheres, lectures given in Basel 2006.
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7 Brandon Labelle, ‘Een andere akoestiek’ (A different acoustics), in OASE 78, pp. 14-23.
8 Juhani Pallasmaa. ‘Mental and existential ecology’. In: The Poetics of Space. Boston 1994, pp. 179-187.