Attention Audio Journal For Architecture

The pianist Glenn Gould was dogmatic about his recording setup, placing the microphone as close as possible to his piano to exclude the sound of the surrounding room. That is, until he encountered the music of Alexander Scriabin—Gould felt that no one acoustic could do justice to Scriabin’s mystical musical language, and devised a system of ‘sound cameras’ that could zoom into or zoom out of his piano. Gould’s ambitious ‘Acoustic Orchestrations’ experiment remained unfinished, however, until music professor Paul Théberge discovered it in an archive and brought the project to completion.

One day, while practicing the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite #1, Yasuaki Shimizu accidentally ran his tenor saxophone through a reverb machine. The sound so moved him that he embarked on an odyssey to record each of the six Cello Suites in a different acoustical environment. In this piece, Shimizu takes us into a warehouse, a stone quarry, a mine, a concert hall, a Baroque villa and a Gothic palazzo, showing us how the unique acoustics of each site drew out the emotional nuances of each suite in Bach’s masterwork.

Bad acoustics inspired Daniel Neumann to become a composer and sound artist. After struggling to tame echoes, flutter and too much reverberation as a sound engineer at a nightclub in Leipzig, Daniel embraced these and other acoustical peculiarities and made them the focus of his work. In this piece, Neumann talks about how he uses sound to raise awareness of the idiosyncratic sounds of architectural spaces and plays us an iteration of his piece, ‘Free Field / Pressure Field / Diffuse Field’.

This piece addresses the term “Postmodernism” its history, legacy, and use within the discourse of architecture.

This piece addresses the term idea and practice of collecting as a current trope within architectural culture.

This piece addresses the concept and practice of composition in architectural design. Formerly dominant in Beaux-Arts education and somewhat taboo in functionalist modern architecture, composition was a key feature of postmodern architectural discourse and has returned to prominence in recent years in the work of many young architects.

This piece addresses contemporary attitudes towards the idea of kitsch within the academy and architectural practice.

This piece addresses the concept of figuration in architectural discourse today.

This piece addresses the practice of critique as it still operates within architectural design culture today. It taps a new generation of practitioners as to what they see as their relationship to this tradition.

This piece addresses the concept of delight in architectural discourse today.

This piece addresses the idea of discipline in architectural discourse today.

This piece addresses the concept of weirdness in architectural discourse today.

This round-table conversation between Stan Allen, Jesse Reiser and Michael Meredith addressed the personal experiences of the participants of formalist pedagogy across several decades.

This interview with Axel Kilian and Sigrid Adriaenssens addressed the idea of form-finding in architectural design.

This interview with Julian Rose and Garrett Ricciardi addressed their project The Formless Finder.

This interview with the art historian James Meyer about formalism in minimalist art. The interview discussed his historical work on minimalism, Anne Truit, Modernist painting and sculpture at large.

This interview was with the architectural critic and theorist Jeff Kipnis following the publication of his new book, Jeff Kipnis, A Question of Qualities: Essays in Architecture (MIT Press, 2013). The interview ranged across Kipnis’ theoretical stance but delved in particular into his contributions to theories of affect in architecture.

This interview with Jorge Otero-Pailos, author of Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minnesota Press, 2010). The conversation touches upon his education in Cornell and his early encounters with late architectural phenomenology in the 1980s and 1990s before turning to his efforts to historicize architectural phenomenology in his book.

This interview with the late Michael Graves took place at his home in Princeton in 2012. The discussion addressed Graves’s interest in classical form, as well as architectural meaning, and architectural drawing.

This conversation with Bryony Roberts and Dora Epstein Jones about their recent special edited issue of Log, no.31 “New Ancients.” The conversation included Log editor Cynthia Davidson as well as Urtzi Grau and Cristina Goberna of the practice Fake Industries and Matt Roman.