Class Reflection November 20, 2008

The discussion that we had last class on our interaction with sound and architecture was one that I found to be quite fascinating. It triggered my memory of something that I had read what felt like ten years ago (and ended up actually being a year and a half ago) about a company called muzak, who create an environment through glorified elevator music. The article which you can still read here was well worth the hour that it took me to track down. Basically my good cyber friends over at BLDGBLOG discus the notion of cities operating on a soundtrack, and how through implementing something like this an entire city could change. Of course the logistics of the whole scenario are too political to ever make it happen I think it would be a very cool idea to experiment with as I progress with my designs.

Music has the ability to dramatically shift and shape any environment. It has no boundaries and much like color can communicate the same message to a broad spectrum of individuals. Perhaps acoustic urban design will be something in the future, much like how gothic churches were designed to maximize their acoustic impact, public spaces will be designed to work with a certain sound. The above article gave the example of a street in London that played the sounds of a busy market in Amsterdam, or a city which played the sounds of the day before. It all may seem somewhat abstract and unpractical but in a world that is begin to become more and more chaotic, maybe constant background noise would add some aspect of control.

The second section of our class that focused on flood architecture, a seemingly hip subject of discussion these days. Ed Epp came to speak about his own research into designing for water and introduced us to the International Center for Flood Architecture. What I valued most was his emphasis on understanding the pre-existing conditions and tailoring your designs to adapt to these rather than the other way around, a resounding point that we have been hearing time and time again.