FOURM | Archisonics

ArchiSonics – quite simply a conflation of two words, Architecture, and Sonics, a dynamic, active space where two forms unite, intersect, and interact, a dualism which appears to float in and around each others’ gestural patterns. Buildings surround us, creating and unfolding a processional sonic scenario where sounds generate form, and forms generate sounds.

Despite the fact that architecture and music/sound have differing phenomenal presences, the underlying organisation of their independent formal structures are similar. The purpose of these investigations is to creatively dissect and dissolve the boundaries between the two disciplines, and through experimentation, reveal that there exists between them a consistent and organic union.

The project is realised through the association and interplay of sound and form in architecture, and takes as its point of departure, Goethe’s aphorism, “..architecture is frozen music..” It is our intention to demonstrate certain correspondences between sound and the built form by re-structuring Goethe’s phrase and via the disarmingly simple expedient of semantically inverting it, we may re-constitute, or “release” sound from form, and literally “unfreeze” these frozen sounds.

This can be approached in a number of ways that will be explored and analysed in subsequent editions of the Archisonics series. For now, we intend to introduce fresh perspectives, and alternative approaches determined and shaped by subjective interpretation. Through the human organs of perception, the phenomenal world that is perceived can perhaps be best understood as systems of pattern, or as complex geometric structures of form, harmony and proportion. When ancient cultures chose to examine their reality through the metaphors of geometry and music (music being the study of the proportional laws of sound frequency), they were already close to the position of our most contemporary science.

An important question is raised here – how can architecture be articulated as sound? One obvious approach is to interpret the constructed form as notation. In plan and section, buildings closely resemble abstract musical notation, and notation represents abstract information about sound. Musical Notation may simplistically be composed of dots and lines. The denser use of lines on the pictorial notation, can signify the density of the sound represented. So the material that is notated at one place is different from other places. This then becomes a map, a territory, a topography. What is important in the sense of the abstract notational tool, is that lines are abstract graphics, a media, without stylistic conditions imposed on them. Then one begins to superimpose other conditions of sound on the abstract notations. These two are prerequisite to making spatial  and textural arrangements.

The blueprint is the beginning of a design shaped and disciplined by programme, materiality and structure. When these elements unite and intersect, we may think of them as a form of graphic  score. It can be edited, but on a deeply intuitive level. Once again, we refer to the nature of lines in the blueprint drawings, their density and their relationship to spatial conditions, and how these spatial conditions can be conceived by use of certain materials.

Linear forms, cubic space, symmetrical perspective, and volumetric repetition all contribute towards a formal language of architecture, that can now be read and construed as sound. An evolving music, a durational, phenomenological sound-form within a matrix of vectors and lines of occurrence. However, this linear and symmetrical language can also be subjected to further distortion, whereby surfaces are warped or ruptured, replacing the vanishing points of serial composition with the multiple foci prevalent in post modern, and so called “de-constructionist“  architecture. Sound is thereby thrust into constructive and deconstructionist potential, by revealing spatiality as an audible condition, bringing to life spatial form by revealing its temporal occurrence and passing.

Our purpose is to link the chaotic physicality of a sound to the image content of architecture. Architecture provides new possibilities of not only looking at form, but of linking form to the physical context. The fluid space created through sound waves, with multiplicity of image is an architecture of overlapping of contours. Such architecture is based on a spatial organism of flowing, curving, warping, multiplicity of space. It is not drawn by mechanical means of producing design, but rather the forms are marked out to indicate how it should grow as organism. Thus, sonic architecture fully explores the location - the site of its growth. Its final forms are only ascertained when construction is completed. Sonic Architecture is organic.