PS02 The Sound of Architecture: Acoustic Atmospheres in Place

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s theory of architectural character has generally been considered only in representational and programmatic terms. Yet in the text of L’architecture (1804), Ledoux describes the various projects of his ideal city of Chaux as having distinct atmospheres appropriate to their program, and engaging the spectators’ senses, imagination and emotions. Each project has its own expressive qualities of inhabitation, form, light and shadow, vegetation, odor, temperature, and especially sound: the murmuring of leaves and streams; the singing of birds and nymphs; cries of joy, love, agony and remorse; the seductive playing of exotic instruments; the music of the heavens; and the silence of death. In Ledoux’s telling, all sounds, natural and manmade, take on a distinctly musical quality and join with architectural language into a larger synesthetic and atmospheric sense of caractère. In this paper, I argue that the “musicality” of Ledoux’s atmospheres serves, on the one hand, to imaginatively evoke in his reader the emotional experience of the moral consonance of human nature, society and nature that Ledoux aimed to effect in his architecture. Furthermore, through an analysis of key projects in Chaux such as the Lavoir, the Church, the Oikema, and the Theater of Besançon, I will show as well how this “musical,” acoustic dimension of character plays an essential role in Ledoux’s theory of architecture as a morally transformative form of legislation, in both imagined and real projects. In so doing, I will draw upon Rousseau’s conception of the moral and political significance of the original musicality of language to show how Ledoux’s Architect could, by virtue of the “musicality” of architectural language, aspire to give new shape to a people’s moeurs, or mores and customary ways of life, that was consonant with nature.

“Our imperative duty is to make for Ronchamp a voice”: this is how Le Corbusier pitched his idea for a permanent electroacoustic installation at the pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France. His intention was to mount an electric speaker system on a metal frame beside the building. It would emit brief “coups de musique” over the valley at set times (“like Vespers or Matins,” he told his brother Albert), using sound to express the architect’s emotional responses to the Jura topography and, at the same time, to defamiliarize the landscape through the introduction of startling and unsettling noises. “Magnificent liturgical music of the past might be directly framed by a background of modern music,” he explained to Edgard Varèse, “by interventions which are violent, impersonal.”

This paper reconstructs Le Corbusier’s intentions for the sound installation based on drawings, published texts, private correspondence, and his general remarks about electroacoustic technologies such as radio and the loudspeaker. Although the “campanile” was not built for the chapel’s opening in 1955--nor was any music composed for it--Le Corbusier continued to advocate for its realization over the next ten years. There is every reason to regard it as integral to his overall architectural concept for Ronchamp. As such, it sheds light on his enigmatic descriptions of the chapel’s form as “a kind of acoustic sculpture.”

The paper also explores how the campanile project was related to Le Corbusier’s other ecclesiastical buildings and to the Philips Pavilion, created in the midst of his ongoing advocacy for the Ronchamp installation. Finally, the paper discusses how Le Corbusier hoped that architecture could respond to an ostensible crisis of form and place in the age of electric media.

            This paper analyzes the Berlin Wall as a sonic infrastructural space. Contrary to acoustically-designed interiors such as theaters, concert halls, or places of worship, the militarized division of the Berlin Wall created an exterior sound environment through enforced civilian control. Propaganda broadcasts, guard-dogs, gunfire, and sirens were violent, auditory markers used at different times throughout the full length of the fortified barrier.  The patent differences in soundscape on both sides of the Berlin Wall emphasized coerced silence on the East, actively demarcating a territory of surveillance and hostile control.  The heterogeneous creation of the Berlin Wall, from the initial barbed wire fence in 1961 to the later concrete slabs, may seem to belie a centralized architectural intention of creating a specific acoustic atmosphere. Yet the carefully crafted mechanisms of the Berlin Wall were ultimately embodied and enhanced by the sonic experience both from outside and within the Wall’s architecture.

            Today, the sonic relationships inscribed by the Berlin Wall are still accessible at a reconstructed section within the Berlin Wall Memorial, a commemorative site to the city’s historic division and the victims who died attempting to flee across the Wall. A 200-foot long section of the original infrastructure is preserved as it was during historic use, including the iconic graffiti-covered western wall, the eastern wall, and the interstitial death-strip (Todesstreifen)—an open landscape up to 160 yards wide containing a patrol road, hundreds of watchtowers, and any combination of anti-vehicle trenches, floodlights, trip-wires, and other control mechanisms. Findings from archival witness testimonies, architectural assessments, and psychoacoustic field research will pinpoint the primary role of sound in the Wall’s architectural intentions and reveal that the full armature of the Wall cannot be grasped without considering its inherent sonic dimension.

This paper turns to the postmodern as a polar moment of inertia, binding the necessity to transform the very frameworks in which the modern concept of aura no longer functioned—impotent in the changed technological, socio-political, and psychological environment—and in which something new would have to be raised at its place: vibe. 

Catalyzed by the postmodernization of the socio-cultural, technologic, and economic landscape in North America and Europe throughout the 1960s and beyond, architects and designers increasingly assumed the synthesizing role of “vibe merchants” that empathically wove space and media into an ontology of ambience. The notion of vibe resonated with the shifts that permeated art and architecture in the post-war period, signaling not only an aesthetic but semiotic and ontic reevaluation of the built environment and the spatio-temporal experimentations thereof. 

The familiar conception of vibe as something purely qualitative, phenomenological, invisible, and thus ungraspable, overshadows the technical origin of this notion, rooted, as it is, in the quantifiable physical mechanism of vibration. Focusing on the material and technical conditions of vibe anchors this investigation and likewise provides a solid point of departure to explore this concept in its widest manifestations. 

Taking John Storyk’s design for Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios (1970) as a jumping off point, this paper unfurls in relation to an architectural history and theory of vibe that materialized in the transubstantiation of modernism’s Benjaminian aura, shifting perspective from the grandeur of architectural edifices—enveloping the subject in their auratic glow—to postmodernism’s projective subjects—transposing immaterial metaphysics into material physics, generating an adaptogenic ambience. By utilizing the phenomenological properties of technological innovations and their popularized cultural embrace, postmodern agents transposed the modernist dictum of a romanticized aesthetic of technology to an amorous entanglement with the aesthetics of technicity.