scroope19 cambridge architecture journal

cambridge
architecturescroope19
journal
Editors
Stavros Alifragkis
Giorgos Artopoulos
Julia Sussner, PhD
Front Cover, Graphic Design
Giorgos Artopoulos
ISSN: 0966-1026
© Copyright Scroope 2009. No part of this publication may be reproduced without
prior permission from Scroope. Copyright of the articles retained by respective
authors. Copyright of the illustrations is referenced in the corresponding legend.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission for the reproduction of illustrations.
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All articles were formated according to the Harvard style.
With special thanks to:
Amelia Gray
Philip Prager
Donald Saga
Lawrence Schear
Lily Shirvanee
We gratefully acknowledge the following donors for their generous support:
Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge
Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
2
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scroope19ContentsJUNE2009
About the Authors
5
Editorial
9
François PENZ
Foreword
11
Panayotis TOURNIKIOTIS
The Power of the Labyrinth and the Wings of the Architect
14
Daniel M. SUSSNER
Future Past: Digital Enlightenment
and the Visual Commons
24
Samantha MARTIN-McAULIFFE Architecture as Palimpsest in the Athenian Agora
Peter MACAPIA
34
Question:
Can we Question the Relation between
Space and Power as such?
42
Nimish BILORIA
Developing an Interactive Architectural Meta-System for
Contemporary Corporate Environments
52
Irina DAVIDOVICI
Townhouse on Charlotte Road,
Stephen Taylor Architects:
Reflections on Type and Place
64
Stephen TAYLOR
House on Work London, 2006
68
Evangelia ATHANASSIOU
“How the West was Won:” Transformations at the
“Western Entrance” to the Thessaloniki
72
cambridge architecture journal
3
Maria HELLSTRöM REIMER
Pusher Street in Christiania
82
Yael MUNK
When the Ghosts of Colonialism Invade the
City of Paris: from Mon Oncle to Caché
94
Sumet JUMSAI
Power of the Celluloid and Reflection on History
100
Juliana HODKINSON
Instrumentality and the Urban Instrumentarium
106
Lukas FEIREISS
Stranger than Fiction:
On the Power of Perception in Public Spaces
114
Valerie WALKERDINE
Power, Space and Anxiety
in the Work of Anthony Gormley
120
Syrago TSIARA
Body Politics and Monumental Public Scultpure
in Totalitarian Regimes
124
Maria TSANTSANOGLOY
Art and Architecture:
The “Costakis Collection”
at the State Museum of Contemporary Art
in Thessaloniki, Greece
134
Stavros ALIFRAGKIS
and
François PENZ
Power of “Reconstruction:”
Dziga Vertov’s Cinematic Socialist
City of the Future
144
interview with Perry BARD
Power Structures and Digital Media:
2008 Man with the Movie Camera
The Global Remake
154
The Power of Musical Montage:
Michael Nyman’s
soundtrack for Vertov’s
Man with the Movie Camera
160
interview with Michael NYMAN
4
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Instrumentality and the
Urban Instrumentarium
Juliana Hodkinson
Let us listen to our cities, say philosopher Jean-Francois Augoyard
and sociologist Henry Torgue in the introduction to their alphabetical sourcebook of sound effects, Sonic Experience.1 From Walter
Ruttmann’s (1887-1941) Berlin sound collage Weekend (1929) up
through the 20th century and into the new millennium, representations and conceptual abstractions of the city have been crucial to
the development of sound art, just as the ubiquity of sound has
come to serve as a paradigm in thinking about the city.
The sonic turn in urban studies offers an excellent perspective from which to consider models of how we perceive and use
the city. Listening is a sensory navigation in a world of overlapping,
porous phenomena – sound spreads, and sonic effects co-exist in
complex ways that require aural concentration for their differentiation. Regarding urban auditory territory from the point of sound art,
we can see how sound artists bring relationships between listeners
and their sonic surroundings into play, using the technologies of
recording, amplification, and resonance – both as instruments of
representation, and for prompting interaction as a tool of agency.
Sound art with an explicitly urban dimension often brings these issues of agency and power into relief.
Considering a historical work such as Else Marie Pade’s
(b.1924) Copenhagen montage Symphonie Magnétophonique
(1958) alongside recent works such as Jacob Kirkegaard’s installation Broadway (2007), and Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks
(2003-ongoing), tells us not only about the development of sound
art, from tape collage through installation to soundwalk, but also
about how the urban listener has changed from detached flâneur
to immersed individual. In the work of all three artists named, the
potential of sound technologies to augment our audition of the city
is optimised as a major point of the aesthetic experience.
At first glance, the “instrumental” aspect of sound art invoked
by talk of agency seems to have nothing in common with instru106
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mental music. But punning on the associations produced by the
term “instrument” might, nevertheless, bring a discussion of sound
art closer to its physical and material aspects.
Pade, Kirkegaard, and Kubisch’s soundworks can be considered partly in terms of their uses of the urban instrumentarium
(its sonic effects), but also in terms of the modes of instrumentality
by which sound artists and their listeners structure these sounds
in a set of orientational relationships. Our perceptions of urban instrumentality and personal agency have changed greatly since the
broadly industrialist view of early musique concrète.
Augoyard and Torgue appeal to us to reflect on the instrumental dimension of urban space, and the way that sound events
are shaped not only by urban context but also by the listener’s auditory competence, psychology, culture, and background:
“The city has sometimes been described as a real musical
instrument; the material and spatial characteristics of urban
morphology can in fact be compared with similar aspects of
acoustic instrumentation. The analogy, which calls for measurement and examination, only considers passive acoustic
properties, and therefore does not deserve deeper interest.
The metaphor really inspires analysis in relation to performance, the ways to play and conduct sounds, the design and
use of effects. What instruments are available to technicians
and researchers, administrators and users, designers and
inhabitants? What is the sonic instrumentarium of urban environments?”2
Augoyard and Torgue are quick to dismiss the urban sound
environment as analogous with a musically instrumental palette, in
favour of engaging with it as a site of transformation. Their project
is at the intersection of physical and applied acoustics, architecture
and urbanism, sociology and everyday culture, musical aesthetics,
and “textual and media expressions” – a mix that typifies auditory
culture studies and shies away from more traditionally “musical”
representational descriptions. Nevertheless, their formulation of
the sonic instrumentarium of cities has a considerable overlap with
the most traditionally musical of the works considered in this article.
Scoring City Sounds
Even the title of Else Marie Pade’s Symphonie Magnétophonique
indicates the composer’s consciousness of a musical tradition. Else
Marie Pade is a classically trained Danish composer, revived in recent years as a pioneer of Danish electronic sound art.
Symphonie Magnétophonique is a 20-minute sound portrait
of the city of Copenhagen based on recordings made around the
city, evoking an urban day from early morning, through work and
rush-hour, an evening’s entertainment, and back to bed at the end
of the day – a temporal narrative that is shared by works such as
Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin hörfilm Weekend (1929) and Luc Ferrari’s
(1929-2005) more pastoral Prèsque Rien (1970), depicting in
sound a day in a fishing village.
cambridge architecture journal
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Pade’s Symphonie Magnétophonique was composed
through a handwritten score which at first glance looks like a piece
for percussion ensemble. Different sound sources (milk bottles,
doors, alarm clocks, trams, cars, bicycle bells, etc.) are each given
their stave or part; they are notated motivically, rhythmically, and
dynamically as if they were acoustic classical instruments.
What are the sound sources, the instruments? Birdsong, a
whistling milkman, clockwork, snoring, an alarm clock, clock tower
bells, cisterns, machines, machinic voices, a door slamming, dance
music, Copenhagen’s characteristic bicycle bells, buses, a typewriter, birds whose cries are slowed down, 24 hours from 6 a.m.
to 6 a.m., a Tivoli/fairground, an organ grinder, trains, trams, footsteps, kitchen sounds, a kiss, quotations of Danish music such as
“Champagne Gallop,” sirens, a heartbeat; even a falling bomb, followed by police sirens and mumbling crowds.
The most archetypically urban of these sounds overlap with
Walter Ruttmann’s instrumentarium, but many of the recorded
sources are specifically local to Copenhagen. There are lots of
people-sounds, but few spoken voices; there’s the milkman’s whistle, sounds of snoring, toothbrushing, kisses, yawns, footsteps, but
the only voices are a coloratura soprano, a man and a woman saying “hallo,” a child’s song, the radio news, a newspaper seller, and
the insistent, rhythmicised repetition of the word “arbejde” (work).
The compositional treatment of voices supports the dominance of
instrumental music (and the machinic) over the vocal in post-war
composition; as an alternative to vocal, dramatic, and choral musics, instrumental music – like sound art - is considered “abstract.”
Departing from a simple cut-and-splice technique, the treatment of the recordings develops through various manipulations
(mainly reverse distortion and alterations in playback speed), to
become a series of compositional manoeuvres within the musique
concrète paradigm, with which Pade was in close contact during
this period. These basic electronic manipulations are also very
close to the sonic effects that Augoyard and Torgue describe as
elementary, compositional, or electro-acoustic.
In Pade’s own words,
Jacob Kirkegaard’s Broadway.
“[...] whereas a hörspiel would have presented the course
of a day in a naturalistic sound-collage, in this symphony
we tried to make naturalistic (concrete) sound into abstract
tone-material. Every sound contains a ‘tone’ and a ‘rhythm,’
and through operations such as change of splicing, crossmodulation, echo, dynamic regulation, and juxtaposition, we
tried to order the isolated naturalistic sounds (the parts in the
concrete orchestra) according to the table prescribed by the
score.”3
Source: Jacob Kirkegaard
In terms of the thematisation of “instrumentality” in urban
sound art, and the way that different artists “play” the city, one can
say that Pade takes recordings of everyday effects and isolates
them as instrumental timbres which enter into a layered composition of shuffled sounds that are roughly identifiable, and also undergo a kind of musical tone transformation. In the way that musical
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instrumentalists shape tones with vibrato, phrasing, and articulation, so Pade enters into the aesthetic possibilities of these everyday recorded sound-objects and draws out their potential for being
abstracted and extracted in the interests of a specific artistic language.
Urban Reverberations
Installations such as Jacob Kirkegaard’s (b.1975) Broadway (2007)
demonstrate a kind of instrumentality that is interesting in virtue of
resonance – both in terms of architecturally acoustic concerns and
in the composer’s way of bringing a city to resonance at an artistic
level.
In Broadway, the vibrations of 5 cast iron pillars are recorded
and captured through subtle resonance spectra, and played back
into the pillars through 12 exciters fastened onto each one.4 The
columns run through the gallery space of the commissioning institution (New York’s Swiss Institute), connecting the space – through
vibrations – to the rest of the building and, ultimately, to the street
and subway below.5
Set up in this way, the five columns act as loudspeakers,
while at the same time filtering urban noise. They “play” the sounds
of Broadway, each in its individual resonant frequency – but the narrow resonance spectra result in a limited playback frequency, and
thus the busyness of the location’s address is muted to an abstract
hum. The way that Kirkegaard’s installation offers a means of experiencing reverberations of the urban environment relies on nuances
too subtle to be intuitively linked with our everyday conception of
this archetypically urban site; the artist’s amplification of urban sonic phenomena results in a smoothing of the city’s irregular roar.
Acoustic architect Barry Blesser extends a relatively conventional and well-established topic that is the foundation of practical
acoustics – namely, how musical sound reverberates in space – to
ask how concert spaces and auditoria are activated through musical sound as “metainstruments.” This discussion can be useful to
apply to the case of urban space (as an auditorium) and sound art
that is played onto the urban field. Blesser’s book analyses aural
architecture devised for musical purposes, but in the case of sound
art spreading throughout the city and presupposing sonic ubiquity
as its meaningful material, we can also consider the city as a space
for reverberation, a kind of metainstrument.
“As a simplification, a musical instrument contains two
acoustically coupled elements: an active energy source, and
one or more passive elements that create a unique timbre.
For example, a violin has vibrating strings, an active source
of sonic energy when the violinist pushes a bow across the
strings. Musical energy is converted into acoustic energy
at the point of contact. Vibrating strings then couple their
acoustic energy to the violin body, which acts as a passive resonant enclosure and surface radiator. Drums, organ
pipes, cymbals, and even singers can also be modelled as
active energy sources coupled to passive resonators. Both
the passive and active elements of an instrument may serve
cambridge architecture journal
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Christina Kubisch:
Electrical Walks.
Source: Courtesy of Christina
Kubisch
either or both of two separate functions: shaping the spectral
timbre, and creating temporal spreading.”6
In the relation between musical instrument (primary resonant
enclosure) and concert hall (secondary resonant enclosure), then,
the second contributes to the first, governing how the passive and
active elements of an instrument shape the way it sounds and create its diffusion in space.
“When the violin’s body transmits its sound to the concert
hall’s enclosure, the violin becomes a metaviolin; without a
secondary resonant enclosure, the violin remains a protoviolin. Performance spaces create a new class of musical instruments: metaviolin, metaclarinet, metaoboe, and so forth.”7
On this model, the pipes in Kirkegaard’s installation are in
a way both primary and secondary resonant enclosures. They are
both instrument and enclosure, through which Kirkegaard plays the
building back onto itself.
Jacob Kirkegaard has a specific interest in resonance, often
approaching the making of new pieces through acoustic aspects of
spaces and listening phenomena – especially those aspects that
require amplification in order to be accessible to auditory perception. Using accelerometers, hydrophones, home-built electromagnetic receivers, and other combinations of resonators and microphones, Kirkegaard typically seeks vibrations that can be fruitful
for aesthetic listening. The environments where he looks for these
sounds – “secret sounds,” as he calls them himself – are not always urban; they can be industrial, volcanic-geological, domestic,
or even anatomical (the inner ear). The abstract smoothing of the
sound is a characteristic of Kirkegaard’s work, such that resonance
and filter are tightly joined in both concept and physical realisation.
Electromagnetic Immersion:
Immersed in the Electromagnetic Soundfield
In their introduction to The Auditory Culture Reader, Michael Bull
and Les Back invoke US experimental composer Pauline Oliveros’
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(b.1932) term “deep listening” as a model for rethinking social experience, community, relational experiences regarding spaces and
places, and power relationships. The kind of work that goes on in
deep listening (as opposed to easy listening) is distinguished by
its demand on the listener for an agile mode of listening.8 Agile listening is a particularly fitting description in relation to the issues of
agency and instrumentality that arise in connection with Christina
Kubisch’s (b.1948) Electrical Walks, in that the agility is very literal.
Hearing one of Christina Kubisch’s electrical soundwalks literally
requires movement on the part of the listener. Auditory discrimination at any level (from the simply orientational to the abstractly
acousmatic) requires intentionality in listening; Kubisch’s electrical
walks make this intentionality into a prerequisite for locating anything to be heard at all.
Similar to the work of Janet Cardiff (b.1957), whose name is
synonymous with audio walks, Christina Kubisch’s Electrical walks
increase the listener’s agency through mobile listening; the playback situation is superimposed on a virtual cityscape that overlaps
unreliably and mischievously with the sounds heard in the headphones. With Kubisch, the interactive element is increased by being extended to the production of sound, such that the listener’s curiosity is rewarded by seeking out electromagnetic fields and having their existence confirmed through noise of one kind or another.
In Electrical Walks, listeners are directed along pre-planned
urban soundwalk routes wearing custom-made wireless headphones that detect and amplify electromagnetic fields and convert
signals to audible soundwaves, through a set of induction coils. The
listener is given the headphones and a map of the area, marked
with suggestions of possible routes and areas of interesting electrical fields. The listener’s technical instrumentality in the work is limited to perhaps adjusting the volume on the headset, but the key
agency lies in walking with the headset and positioning oneself very
precisely in relation to specific sources. Walk maps include suggestions as to what kinds of sites demonstrate interesting sonic fields,
Christina Kubisch: Electrical
Walk, Birmingham, 2007.
Source: Christina Kubisch
cambridge architecture journal
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e.g. “Go up to level 5 and stand outside Hugo Boss to listen to their
security system,” or “listen to the variety of sounds emitted by security gates and the revolving billboards.” (In this respect, Kubisch’s
electrical walks even go part way in providing the “sound history of
surveillance” that Bull and Back demand.) ATMs, Wi-Fi areas, ticket
machines, and mobile phones all become virtual instruments waiting to be played by listeners, through head movements akin to the
hovering of a musician’s hands around a Theremin.
As David Michael Perez comments in the liner notes to a CD
of compositions by Kubisch derived from the Electrical Walks: “the
agency and power given to the spectator may be the work’s ultimate achievement,” indicating as they do the extent to which there
are “unseen forces at play in our beguiling world.”9 One of the tracks
on the CD consists solely of sounds derived from security gate
emissions in six different cities.
If Pade’s listener is a musical flâneur, listening to the city in
terms of motifs and timbres, Kubisch’s listener is an immersed individual with a high degree of mobility and agency.
According to Oliver Grau, in an immersive relationship:
“[...] the relations are multifaceted, closely intertwined, dialectical, in part contradictory, and certainly highly dependent on the disposition of the observer. Immersion can be an
intellectually stimulating process; however, in the present as
in the past, in most cases immersion is [...] characterised by
diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing
emotional involvement in what is happening.”10
Compared to representational strategies in acousmatics, immersion offers an opportunity for the constitution of presence that
– in urban sound art – fits well with highlighting the everyday, the
vernacular, the local, the site-specific/related – “The quality of apparently being present in the image [...] achieved thorough maximisation of realism and increased through illusionism in the service of
an immersive effect.”
In Janet Cardiff’s classic audio walks, the fictional element of
simulated stereophonic sound goes hand-in-hand with this reference to illusionism, whereas in Kubisch’s electrical walks there is
no attempt to produce a fictional illusion; the strangeness of the
exercise itself, the sounds that it produces, the immediacy and excitement of the interactive element [...] all these replace illusion, yet
still in the service of the immersive effect – giving the listener the
strongest impression possible of being at the location where the
sound is whilst immersed in an aspect of reality that is so strange it
seems virtual or “magic,” ethereal, and likely to disappear as soon
as the headphones are taken off.
Kubisch’s interest in electromagnetic fields resonates with
Augoyard and Torgue’s commentary on urban drones, as sonic
continua linked to physical elements in urban and industrial mechanised civilisations (car traffic, fluorescent lighting, muzak).11
Kubisch, Kirkegaard and Pade demonstrate just a handful of
ways to listen to our cities, and to play and conduct sounds through
urban aesthetic experiences.
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Endnotes
Route map for Electrical Walk,
South Kensington, London, 2005.
Source: Courtesy of
Christina Kubisch
1. Augoyard, J.F. and Torgue, H. (2006) Sonic Experience: A Guide to
Everyday Sounds. Queen’s University Press, McGill, p.4.
2. Augoyard and Torgue, op. cit., p.4.
3. Bruland, I. (2006) Else Marie Pade og Symphonie Magnétophonique.
Forlag, Museum Tusculanums, p.49.
4. Exciters are electro-acoustic vibrators, which can transform any substance into a loudspeaker.
5. The installation is described in detail in Kølbæk Iversen, M. (2007): The
Sound of the White Columns at http://secretsounds.dk/mk_broadway.pdf,
originally published in Danish as Lyden af Smedejernssøjler på Broadway in
Dansk Musik Tidsskrift, no. 5, pp.160-5.
6. Blesser, B. and Salter, L.R. (2007) Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?
Experiencing Aural Architecture. MIT Press, Cambridge, p.135.
7. Blesser, op. cit., p.136
8. Bull, M. and Back, L. (2003) The Auditory Culture Reader. Berg, p.3.
9. Kubisch, Ch. (2007) Invisible/Inaudible: Five Electrical Walks. Important
Records.
10.Grau, O. (2003) Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. MIT Press,
Cambridge, p.13.
11. Augoyard and Torgue, op. cit., pp.40-6.
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