Cultural Studies Review
volume 18 number 3 December 2012
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/index
pp. 171–93
Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach 2012
Between Noise and Silence
Architecture since the 1970s
ALEXANDRA BROWN
AND
ANDREW LEACH
GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY
Architecture and the city offer natural subjects to the increasingly secure field of
noise and sound studies. Noise and noises inflect the experience of the urbanite in
cities of all scales, lending aural substance to what Georg Simmel famously described
as ‘the intensification of emotional life’.1 For architecture, noise is a matter of
acoustics, of relational experience, of the often blurred distinction between
individual, social and institutional zones. Numerous studies have sought to account
for the variety and effect upon social and cultural environments of what R. Murray
Shafer coined the ‘soundscape’, trading the optic supremacy of the picturesque
tradition of regarding the city visually for a textured sense of the city as heard and of
urban action as noisy.2 Televisions, parties, cars and ambulances, conversation: this
‘auditory terrain in its entirety of overlapping noises, sounds and human melodies’
serves to orientate one in relation to buildings and cities and may be as welcome to
one individual as it is repellent to another.3 Even in the rural town or the
countryside, noise registers in its absence or by its difference.
ISSN 1837-8692
Vision, visuality and the capacity for architectural projection form a foundation
for the long development of the modern (and modernist) architectural project from
the Renaissance to the present day.4 The interdependence of architecture’s capacity
to see the future from the standpoint of the present and its imperative to work
towards that future’s realisation has been fundamental to the ambitions and failures
of modern architecture in the twentieth century. Pursuing this now well‐established
historical judgment on different terms, we here follow Jacques Attali’s invitation to
judge, instead, by what can be heard rather than seen.5 This essay considers noise in
architectural discourse as it might lend form to issues hitherto tabled in rather
different terms. We ask what noise offers this discussion or, perhaps better put,
what seeing architectural debates in terms of distinctions between noise and silence,
random and structured sound, silence as absence and pregnant void might add to
disciplinary debates within architectural theory and criticism. By treating these
acoustic values analogously rather than literally we wish to suggest that reading the
late postmodern moment through this filter opens out new possibilities for a critical
assessment of this period and its present‐day legacies.
Our task, then, is to consider the conceptual implications of ‘noise’ for
architecture since the advent of postmodernism and to understand something of the
stakes of ‘noise’—read metaphorically against its two counterpoints, silence and
language—in the operation of critical thinking in contemporary architectural culture
and practice. Our reading is openly speculative, considering as it does the
implications of noise and its attendant opposites as conceptual categories with
interpretative and critical consequences. These consequences seem to us
particularly poignant in light of values and strategies that align with an idea of
silence and its interruption in determining the role of architectural form,
architectonic and conceptual space in architectural debate and practice of the
present and recent past. Those values and the examples that have served as their
most obvious expositions have provoked discussion (once more) on the often tense
relationship between architecture’s critical and productive activities—including
critical action through practice and propositional thinking through criticism.
Although we will turn to specific architectural cases in the second half of the
essay, our narrow entry to this theme is through an essay by the Italian architectural
historian Manfredo Tafuri, first published in 1974 in the American journal
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Oppositions, titled ‘L’Architecture dans le boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the
Criticism of Language’.6 Tafuri’s essay concerns the subject and tasks of the
architectural critic and as much as the essay now reads as a dated reflection on past
problems it nevertheless touches upon basic distinctions of enduring pertinence to
the way that critical discourses conceptualise and engage architectural production—
a mirror, therefore, on cultural production read more broadly. This is a matter that
concerns architecture specifically, and in specific ways, within a cultural field. This
problem, along with the terms that Tafuri allows us to consider in light of a tension
between noise and silence, allows us to conduct a reading of a historical moment in
architectural culture of the late twentieth century. It also opens out onto the broader
role of critical thinking in what has been controversially dubbed, in architecture as
elsewhere, a post‐critical, post‐historical moment, in which positions determined
and debated in the 1970s are played through to their full extension.7
—THEN
Unsurprisingly for the time in which Tafuri wrote, the concept of language serves
him as an extended analogy for understanding the content and compositional
systems of architecture, both historically and in the present. The well‐established
historiographical conceptualisation of space and classicism as architectural language
fed a critical reaction by Tafuri and his contemporaries of architecture’s tendency
towards introspection and away from the realities of procurement, realisation and
occupation that determined architecture’s status in the world much more than did
architectural intentions, traditions or conceptual underpinnings.8 His criticism of a
trans‐historical (and hence super‐real) classical or spatial language of architecture
was a symptom of a broader struggle in the postwar decades, waged by critics on
behalf of a broader architectural culture, to understand architecture’s conceptual
and political limitations in the wake of the evident institutional and social failings of
architecture’s mid‐century modern movement.
It is in this light that we begin from a single line in which Tafuri writes of ‘the
noise of Aymonino and the silence of Rossi’. Tafuri addresses a supremely
contrapuntal moment in the Milanese Quartiere Gallaratese (1967–1972): a housing
project master‐planned by Carlo Aymonino, but in which is embedded a building by
Aldo Rossi that offers a formal island removed, as Tafuri put it, ‘from the sphere of
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173
Figure 1: Quartiere Gallaratese, Milan, depicting blocks by Aldo Rossi (l) and Carlo Aymonino (r)
(Photograph: Silvia Micheli. All rights reserved.)
the quotidian’.9 In simple, compositional terms, the situation is roughly that of a late‐
neorationalist building appearing in the midst of a late‐neorealist precinct, where
the (literally) white block insisting upon order, system and rhythm met the
(literally) grey complex privileging formal disjunction and typological juxtaposition.
(We will return to the significance of ‘white’ and ‘grey’ below.) Tafuri invites us to
read silence and noise as code for, on the one hand, a mute moment of conceptual
and artistic autonomy and, on the other, architecture’s integration within a
technical, social, economic and political reality that necessarily determines aspects
of the work, including its historicity.
As Fulvio Irace read the project two decades later, Rossi’s contribution to the
Gallaratese complex is a ‘unicum’ in which Aynomino’s ‘projective idea of the
quarter as a “contracted” city’ is exposed in light of the ‘fallacies and difficulties’ of
translating a conceptual position into a world shaped by the messiness and
irrationality of construction and inhabitation.10 As a moment of criticism, Rossi’s
silence serves to remonstrate Aymonino and his conceptual manoeuvre of treating
noise as language, the random as a system, normalising reality as a compositional
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value by finding within it a form of linguistic structure, albeit cacophonic. Aligning
our own reading with Tafuri and Irace, Rossi’s critical act rests upon his pursuit of
the value of language to its logical conclusion. That is, Rossi stakes out a position of
conceptual silence by absorbing and neutralising the random and the irrational.
Italian architectural culture of the 1960s and 1970s was informed by a heavily
politicised discourse on architecture’s formal and conceptual autonomy in which
Aymonino and Rossi—alongside others of their generation—conducted a sustained
investigation into architecture’s role as an agent and index of socioeconomic and
political change. The Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, where
Aymonino, Rossi and Tafuri all served as professors, was arguably at the forefront of
that exploration within Italy, serving nationally and internationally as a talisman for
architecture’s confrontation with its political dimensions. As much as that historical
discourse was idiosyncratic and bound to particular historical and institutional
circumstances, it shed light, then as now, on more general conditions of an
architectural culture in which the encounter between ideas and reality remains
awkward. According to one position of that earlier moment, architecture’s efficacy
lay with its rigorous isolation from the world at large; and for the other, its insistent
integration.
Figure 2: Quartiere Gallaratese, Milan, depicting blocks by Aldo Rossi (foreground) and Carlo
Aymonino (background)
(Photograph: Silvia Micheli. All rights reserved.)
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If architecture could be cast by Tafuri as a coherent if obsolete language still
bound in the 1970s to the modern movement—the utopianism of which had been
shown to be groundless and the radicality of which had proven ineffectual—then the
critical manoeuvres available to the architect were either extra‐linguistic or anti‐
linguistic. Extra‐linguistic, in this sense, points to the unadapted reuse of words and
phrases, analogously speaking, as an extension or foil of the modern architectural
tradition: words beyond syntax, fragments with no sense of the whole.11 Tafuri
accused such architectural practices as those captured under the epithet of the New
York Five—Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Michael Graves, Charles Gwamthey and
Robert Siegel, and Richard Meier—of recycling the ‘battle remnants’ of
architecture’s historical avant‐garde, invoking radicality through the deployment of
formal fragments and compositional tactics divorced from the program for which
they were first devised. This rendered contemporary architectural practice as a kind
of Civil War re‐enactment in which uniforms and projectiles that once mattered a
great deal had come to matter only to those actors whose nostalgic gestures were
ultimately without risk. In critical shorthand, this was the ‘White’ position of the
American 1970s and 1980s, uttering ‘mute signals of a language whose code has
been lost’.12
The consensus among critics within Tafuri’s circle was that if a cohesive and
articulate modern movement had failed to inform the conditions of twentieth‐
century society, then the means to overcome architecture’s impasse lay beyond that
disciplinary or artistic language, the structures ensuring its autonomy. They located
the paradox of this situation in the twentieth‐century legacy of the architectural
project as the model of practice and introspective thought that had lent architecture
an artistic and intellectual coherence from the emergence of a post‐medieval epoch
to the modern age.
Easily confused with what many perceived as his declaration of the ‘death of
architecture’, Tafuri posed the problem of whether the problems of architecture and
the city were, ultimately, the problems claimed directly by architectural culture—
except, as in his criticism of Aymonino, when the conditions of reality were treated
mimetically and thereby absorbed by architecture as part of its linguistic system.
(This risk of miscomprehension explains, in part, the importance to Tafuri of the
British architect James Stirling, who explored and extended the materials and
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structures of architecture’s historical languages to their breaking point.) If the
transformation of language into silence as a refusal of the status of noise in
architecture (as exemplified above by Rossi) can be read as the conceptual
manoeuvre of the Whites, the transformation of noise into a form of language
(Aymonino) underpins the American ‘Grey’ position for which Robert Venturi, Paul
Rudolf and their contemporaries are regularly called upon to stand. They opened
architecture to 'complexity and contradiction', to invoke the title of Venturi’s
seminal book (1966), while claiming the messiness of the popular and the everyday
as an architectural language in its own terms and no longer as the noise in
architecture’s background: thus the importance, at this time, of Bernard Rudofsky’s
Architecture without Architects (1964) or Learning from Las Vegas, by Venturi with
Denise Scott‐Brown and Steven Izenour (1972).13
Extending our case to account for these American coordinates—which, it must
be emphasised, shaped international debate for two decades or more—allows us to
further illuminate and complexify the positions Tafuri read into Aymonino and Rossi
and the way the Quartiere Gallaratese captures two stances that attend to the matter
of autonomy in the face of a messy reality. Tafuri directs us to consider
architecture’s capacity for internal accountability, the efficacy of its willingness to be
tested against internally derived measures; and the concomitant ‘duty of being
aware’ bound into the boudoir of the Marquis de Sade to which Tafuri alludes in the
essay cited at the outset of his essay of 1974.14 Beyond the autonomous architecture
of Rossi lay the unordered noise of all those competing conditions external to
architecture that Aymonino’s project represented. Architecture could turn towards
this reality in the name of criticism and critical action, sacrificing autonomy but
activating its reliance on mimesis as a disciplinary and artistic tool with which to
make sense of the world. This pits the value of noise against the values of language
(structured and meaningful sound) or silence, being the absence of sound, but not
necessarily of language, which can be mute and meaningful. Architecture could,
under these terms, also hold itself aloof from noise by way of an insistently ‘noiseful’
stance (the American ‘Grey’ position), imitating the messy chaos of reality by
claiming it as a value for architecture, or by absorbing and negating it in the manner
of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who (writes Tafuri), ‘speaks by making of silence a
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177
mirror’—the literal void rendered as a conceptual solid, to invoke Eisenman’s
reflections on Mies’s lesson.15
All of these positions, we need to note, are not realist in any pure sense. Even
Aymonino, who regards ‘noise’ as architecture’s proper context and content, claims
noise as a value for architecture and thus regularises it within the ‘language’ that
holds architecture together as an institution. For him, the critical effect of this noise
is partially negated by the recourse made to existing institutional and conceptual
structures. Nonetheless, we can read the tension between the noise of Aymonino’s
general scheme at the Quartiere Gallaratese and the silence of Rossi’s contribution to
the project is a deliberate play on the part of both architects, a form of modus
vivendi with implications for the general conditions of that culture of production
and criticism from the end of the 1960s onwards. The exchange between these two
figures speaks not only to the implications of historical debates concerning
autonomy and integration as conceptual and political positions claimed by
architectural polemicists in the 1970s, but also to the critical consequences and
limitations of these positions as taken up by later generations who accommodated
abstracted versions of those stances independent of the untidy historical
circumstances from which they were resolved.
The production of buildings and urban quarters remained central to the
practice of architecture at this time and in its wake, but as architecture in Italy
became increasingly implicated in the political discourse of the extra‐parliamentary
left and its protest movements, the involvement of architects and the implication of
architectural practice in capitalistic processes from building construction and urban
planning through to the design and fabrication of industrial and mass‐produced
design objects exposed the limitations of architecture’s claims for formal and
conceptual autonomy in the face of capitalism as its most insidious context.16
American debates on architectural autonomy during the 1970s centred for the most
part on the White–Grey dialectic, yet the Italian thinking and projects, which in their
abstraction prompted and upheld these positions, were underwritten by experience
of a direct confrontation between architecture and wider sociopolitical concerns.
They therefore contain a level of complexity ill matched by the demands of their
readers to align with rather more absolute positions either for or against a strong
claim upon architectural autonomy. Although there is much that was particular and
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peculiar to the way that debate in architecture was structured in Italy, it also
informed the broader currents of architectural theory as a debate centred on the
United States across the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s that ultimately informed the direction
of international architecture discourse through to the end of the last century.
Against noise, then, two counterpoints persist: language (as appropriation) and
silence (as a linguistic end‐game). Within this conceptual diagram, noise and silence
read as consciously impossible values to which those architects and theoreticians
operating in the historical moment of the Italian 1970s (and American 1980s) could
adhere; that is, silence speaking to a tendency towards a formal and conceptual
autonomy in which the architect defends that which belongs properly to
architecture; noise posing the question of how far architecture can go in
relinquishing what have traditionally or historically been its proper tools and tasks
before ceasing to be architecture altogether. These positions have not disappeared
with time, but remain active in the work that owes a debt of patrimony to this
historical moment and its conceptual implications.
—NOW
The discussion for which Tafuri’s reading of Aymonino and Rossi has acted as a
springboard suggests strong polar positions for architecture of the last four decades
or so, in which autonomy and integration are opposite stances. These are, of course,
difficult to uphold except at the rhetorical level of the claims made by architects for
their work and by critics, historians and theoreticians for the work of others. As far
as realised works of architecture are concerned we get further into our analysis of
this question by speaking of positions within the work rather than by the more
tempting move of characterising the position of the work or its author as a whole.
Thus we have the possibility of moments of noise, moments of silence, moments
when the random coalesces around patterns and meaning, and so forth. With this
caveat in mind, the analogy of noise and its opposites continues to serve as an
interpretative key to understand the present moment in light of the debates around
architectural autonomy that enjoyed their height in the 1970s and which have
sustained a recurrence in recent years. This is especially the case if we do not fail to
recognise that they recall the conceptually imperfect positions of complete
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179
autonomy and resolute introspection on one hand and, on the other, complete
integration and capitulation to the extra‐architectural forces shaping architecture.
Despite considerable changes both to architectural practice and the wider
settings in which architecture has found itself since the 1970s—through the
development of digital technologies of fabrication and representation, for example,
and the further expansion of capitalist processes to which architecture has
responded in an engaged way—contemporary architecture remains arguably bound
to the question of its artistic, disciplinary identity and to the intellectual traditions
that allow for a distinction between architecture, building and planning.17 This
persistence is doubtless informed by the legislative protection the term ‘architect’
enjoys in many countries and territories, just as it has, since the first decades of the
twentieth century, been upheld by a professional infrastructure that advances the
interest of architects without necessarily opening the conceptual category of
architecture to scrutiny.18
A series of recent projects, however, that can be understood to operate at a
level bound more to the ambitions of a critical discourse on architecture than
practices that consolidate professional habits help us to consider the stakes of
arguments, through practice, for autonomous architecture as well as its opposite.
And in these, the positions we have characterised as silent and noiseful remain
useful interpretative keys. Works by Steven Holl Architects (founded 1976), Peter
Zumthor (1979), and Office Kersten Geers David van Severn (2002) help us to
address architectural autonomy as a matter of architecture’s claim as an
autonomous art medium, architecture’s alignment with the manual arts, craft and
construction as a matter of realising objects and engaging materials, and the
negation of both categories by positioning architecture as an actor in economics,
politics, fashion and ideology.19 Our examples are hardly exhaustive, but they serve
to illustrate the three broader tendencies to which we wish to draw attention:
silence, language and noise.
The buildings of Steven Holl Architects achieve a kind of formal and conceptual
silence by overtly privileging aesthetic and compositional considerations over
matters of fabrication and realisation. The works of this practice are beautiful
objects that treat context as a compositional value from which the building, as
self‐contained form, is ultimately distinct. While necessarily engaging with its wider
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Figure 3: Cité de l’Océan et du Surf, Biarritz, by Steven Holl Architects with Solange Fabião
(Photograph: topoleku, Creative Commons)
setting in order to realise conceptual projects as buildings, in cities, with money and
building materials and labour and under regulations of various kinds, Holl
nevertheless actively moves his firm’s architecture towards the category of art—and
therefore towards a condition insulated, even if only rhetorically, from the demands
of building. Within this position, an introspection informed by an idea of formal and
conceptual autonomy shapes the processes of generating and resolving architectural
form and its effect in order to privilege the work of architecture as an object, where
the means of its participation in institutional programs, including in what Terry
Smith has called ‘iconomy’, and even the ways in which the work is used and
maintained, take second place to its image as a resolved whole.20
Towards reality, then, and its concomitant noisiness, Holl’s work assumes a
determined silence that positions the architect and his work as artist and art
respectively.21 Unlike Rossi’s contrapuntal, critical silence, however, this is a silence
that treats all noise as a condition relegated to architecture’s exterior. It does not
Brown and Leach—Between Noise and Silence
181
allow for the presence of noise even as a discursive value in the mode demonstrated
by Aymonino. The dogmatic and absolutist stance of Holl’s silence is fundamental
and deliberate, which means that the task of fulfilling a design brief and operating
within the world at large is downplayed and even overshadowed by his production
of mute, beautiful form. An example bears this out.
Completed in 2011, the Cité de l’Océan et du Surf is a museum dedicated to
knowledge of the ocean as a field of cultural and scientific study.22 The highly
acclaimed project grew out of a collaboration between Holl’s firm and the Brazilian‐
born artist and architect Solange Fabião. The museum buildings explicitly refuse the
vernacular vocabulary of red‐tiled roofs favoured by the Tudoresque suburban
holiday villas surrounding the site. As Keiran Long observed in the pages of
Architecture, ‘the juxtaposition of the minimal and modern Cité de l’Océan et du Surf
… with the surrounding grotesques is unintentionally hilarious: like an earnest
teenager reading Goethe at Disneyland.’23 The project’s complete negation of built
context, its clearly positioned refusal to engage with the mundane is, however, less
interesting as a stance we can cast in absolute silence than the more complex
relationship maintained between the museum buildings and the coastline they
overtly acknowledge.
Fittingly for its institutional program, the museum grounds extend from the
seaside site to meet the Biarritz coastline, setting up strategic ocean views and a
formal relationship between the museum buildings and offshore rocky outcrops in
the Bay of Biscay. If the coastline, the outcrops, the inland boundary of the site and
the ocean itself constitute a contextual noise (albeit far from ‘grotesque’), they are
not absorbed into the project. Holl and Fabião instead keep them actively separate
from the formally resolved elements that then assume an insistent formal autonomy.
They internalise the architectonic and relational conditions of being within the
ocean (‘under the sea’) or resting on its surface (‘under the sky’), neutralising
architecture’s external conditions and contexts by refusing the effect of these
conditions upon the buildings themselves, which are in turn rendered as objects. It
may be more accurate to suggest that they translate those contexts into
architectural terms, thereby absorbing that which exists outside the work into a
field determined by the work.
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Figure 4: Cité de l’Océan et du Surf, Biarritz, by Steven Holl Architects with Solange Fabião
(Photograph: Christophe Durand, Creative Commons)
The architectural object, which is beautiful and sophisticated in and of itself,
transmits a kind of conceptual white noise into its surrounds to extend the
resolution found for the design brief by the architect–artist partnership. Tactically,
this resolution stems from the level of abstraction applied by Holl and the series of
decisions determining those elements of the site condition and the institutional
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183
program the project will embrace. Holl and Fabião have no obvious interest in
‘contracting’ and representing the complexity of their subject as a real subject—the
ocean and its costal conditions—but rather insist on a series of discrete and highly
stylised gestures.24 In this sense, the rolling plaza of the Cité de l’Océan et du Surf,
glowing lanterns and concrete ‘undertow’ spaces are uncompromising in their
attention to a formal analogy bound to a highly abstract interpretation of the
institutional program. This manoeuvre, this tendency towards silence, resonates
with the approach taken by Holl in several of the museum and gallery projects he
has proposed and realised, including many of his most famous works.
We also meet a kind of silence in Zumthor’s work, but with the important
difference that his preoccupation is with positioning architecture’s autonomy
through materiality and craft rather than by locating architecture as a discrete art
form capable of sustaining disinterested attention. While this conception of
architecture demands some engagement with the noise of reality—with materials,
modes of fabrication and haptic experience—it further reinforces an internal, mute
expression through its hermit‐like recourse to a body of technical knowledge
attendant to the craft of architecture and its traditions and precedents. By means of
a sustained conceit that appears to favour a straightforward composition informed
by an intimacy with the materials of his works, Zumthor treats the means of making
architecture as privileged knowledge, even in relation to run‐of‐the‐mill
architecture. It is a restricted lexicon and therefore sufficiently detached to sustain a
form of conceptual isolation from the context of architectural practice or, indeed, of
the objects it produces.
Viewed as different aspects of the same basic insulating gesture, Holl's and
Zumthor’s works speak to architecture’s difficult status as a ‘useful art’, dating back
to the separation of art and craft in the eighteenth century and, even earlier, to the
establishment of a modern concept of architecture as rooted in Renaissance
thinking.25 In this sense, Holl’s and Zumthor’s respective claims on architecture’s
behalf as to its conditions as art or craft leave open the opportunity to treat either as
a specifically architectural approach in relation to the design and construction of
built form, privileging the object and that which is irreducibly architectural about it.
And in neither instance is noise welcome.
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Therme Vals, by Peter Zumthor. Photograph by Micha L. Reiser. Wikimedia Commons.
The sculpted bathhouse blocks of the Therme Vals (completed 1996), made
using local materials and construction practices, become silent through the
overlaying of careful details that appear to overrule the project’s more practical,
purely structural dimensions.26 As an addition to an existing 1960s resort complex,
Zumthor’s therme building appears as a sharp stone block protruding from the
alpine landscape. In this sense, however, the block is read as constructed from local
stone, as opposed to being an analogy for the quartzite rock. While a grassed roof
and deep sections of stone wall anchor the structure to a steep mountainous
landscape, the therme building exists as a rationalised moment in this natural
context. Both the solid quartzite walls and the concrete slabs comprising the
building’s main components are expressed, but they tie seamlessly together and,
defying their structural properties, the slabs cantilever over internal spaces as a
series of roof elements separated by channels of glass. In placing material and
construction‐based knowledge at the service of such hyper‐aesthetic detailing,
Zumthor claims an element of craft for architecture rather than allowing the
practical nature of this knowledge to read as an external condition of the work. The
moments in which architecture claims and absorbs building (and its materials, and
its technique) are conceptual moments rather than instances in which ideas and
fabrication meet on an equal footing. The processes involved in the realisation of the
building are external to Zumthor’s architecture.
His stance thus parallels that of Holl, claiming fabrication rather than context
on terms determined by architecture, silencing the noise of reality by absorbing it
within a strong notion of architecture as a practice where the artful object shapes
the field in which it is construed, be it a building site, a metaphysical context or the
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Figure 6: Therme Vals, by Peter Zumthor
(Photograph: Micha L. Reiser, Wikimedia Commons)
field of possibilities governing the technology and techniques of architectural
production. While its terms ultimately differ from those of Holl or even Rossi earlier,
this tactic engages with what we have, after Tafuri, characterised as silence in that it
works to sustain architecture’s intellectual and technical internalities, the discrete
and irreducible set of its internal considerations within which resides, on different
terms in each of our cases, the very concept of architecture and its various claims as
art, discipline, technique, institution and so forth. The architect‐as‐artist and the
architect‐as‐craftsman each claims a specificity for architecture—Holl’s aesthetic
autonomy; Zumthor’s technical autonomy—that sets about to reduce the
interference of noise, of reality, of those extra‐architectural conditions that shape
architectural practice. This search for silence, either through negation or isolation,
serves to define architecture as separate from the world.
With one final case we turn away from silence as a conceit and from noise as a
critical value towards silence as a form of architectural critique that does not
(necessarily) revert to autonomy. Peter Eisenman’s reading of Stirling’s Leicester
Engineering Building (1959–1963)—cited by Tafuri—describes the literal void that
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works as a conceptual solid; Tafuri himself points to Mies’s silence (another void) as
reflective. In both instances, silence plays a meaningful role in the work. While in the
latter case silence acts to negate noise (or that which functions as noise) in a
variation of the manner we have seen above in Rossi’s contribution to the
Gallaratese, in the former case silence serves as a kind of anti‐language, as per
Tafuri’s reading of Stirling. The strategies in both works demand moments of
structured autonomy—neither a ‘natural’ introspection nor an accident of ‘absence’,
but an instrumental banishing of noise in the manner of the gesture Tafuri finds in
Karl Krauss, who in 1914 writes: ‘Let him who has something to say step forward
and be silent.’27 In neither case, as in the sentiment captured by Krauss, is the
poignant silent independent of a position regarding noise (or its absence) and the
audience that registers the same. They convey silence in relational terms, refusing
silence as a value in and of itself.
This (political) possibility appears present in Office Kersten Geers and David
Van Severen’s (KGDVS) work After the Party—the Belgian Pavilion at the 2008
Venice Biennale—in which the restitution of the physical void serves as a dialectical
negation. A double‐skinned, galvanised steel‐clad volume defined a second and
temporary volume in front of the permanent Belgian Pavilion building, through
which volume visitors were required to pass—literally through its intramural
scaffolding—to enter a space emptied of everything except liberally strewn confetti
and a handful of chairs. This ‘Garden Room’ served as the setting for After the Party,
which deployed the void as ‘one of the critical categories with which one can give
architecture back its political significance’ by providing still, open space in
opposition to ‘fullness’.28 In the spirit of Mies and Stirling, but in relation to
circumstances that could not concern their work less, Geers and van Severen reclaim
a form of silence for a critical interaction with the present‐day conditions of
architectural practice and thought. As Aleksandr Bierig observed in the Architectural
Review, it offers ‘a direct rejoinder to the pervasive strategy that attempts to reduce
complex cultural and historical terrain to a simplistic diagram’.29 The architecture
resides, for Office KGDVS, in the intentionality of this gesture.30 This architecture’s
polemical potency lies in the programmatic trade of building for void, this choice for
a moment in which noise is resolutely refused.
Brown and Leach—Between Noise and Silence
187
Figure 7: After the Party, by Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen
(Photograph: Bas Princen. All rights reserved.)
Figure 8: After the Party, by Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen.
(Courtesy: OKGDVS. All rights reserved.)
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After the Party stands at the moment in which the destitution of the once
staggeringly effective imbrication of architectural values with those of neoliberal
politics and economics was decisively demonstrated. Its staging in Venice coincided
with the worldwide economic collapse, justifying Office KGDVS’s suspicions that
structural change to architectural culture was either necessary or imminent. Its
relative silence was stark within a giardino populated by such desperate
declarations of fidelity to late capitalism as documented in Abundant, the Australian
entry of that same year. Architecture is thus defined, for the Belgian project,
specifically by what it is not, turning its back on Australia and all the other pavilions
by means of a seven‐metre‐high double‐skinned wall, rejecting by staging the
denouement of the ‘sad historical moment’ of the present—denying all that it aims
not to be. Writes van Toorn:
Is this silence a temporary cessation, out of which we can decipher a new
élan, a new vocabulary in architecture, one that avoids the murmurings of
the present time? Or is there something else going on? What is certain is
that it is a matter of an independent architecture that intends to manifest
itself politically through its form.31
Here the inverse of noise is not a form of silence indicating introspection in the
manner of Rossi at the Gallaratese, a cleansing of architecture’s language from the
realities of architecture’s place in the noisy world. It is a moment of programmatic
absence informed by the knowledge that all language is one step from a return to
meaninglessness. It thus returns architecture to the critical possibilities of
architectural actions in which architecture’s silence might in fact offer a way to
connect to the world beyond. After the Party is an instant of silent confrontation in
which the loud music disappears suddenly, the lights come on, and the stillness of
the moment is rendered embarrassingly stark.
—
Brown and Leach—Between Noise and Silence
189
Alexandra Brown is a lecturer in Architecture at the Griffith School of Environment
on Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus. An architect and director of the
Brisbane‐based practice Studio Mitt, she is completing her PhD in architectural
history and theory at the University of Queensland.
Andrew Leach is an associate professor of Architecture at the Griffith School of
Environment on Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus. Among his books are What
is Architectural History? (2010), Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts (edited with
John Macarthur, 2009) and Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (2007).
—NOTES
1
Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) in The Blackwell City Reader, 2nd edn, ed. Gary
Bridge and Sophie Watson, Blackwell, Chichester, 2010, p. 103.
2
Compare R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World,
Destiny Books, Rochester, 1977; and John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and other
Irregularities, Routledge, London, 2007.
3
Michael Bull and Les Black, ‘Introduction: Into Sound’, in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull
and Les Black, Berg, London, 2003, p. 11. Compare Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity:
Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,
2002.
4
Manfredo Tafuri, Ricerca del rinascimento. Principi, città, architettura, Einaudi, Turin, 1992, English
edn Interpreting the Renaissance, trans. Daniel Sherer, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2006.
See also Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura, Rome, Laterza, 1968, pp. 19–94.
5
Jacques Attali, Bruits: Essai sur l’économie de la musique, Presse Universitaires de France, Paris, 1977,
English edn, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis and London, 1985, p. 3.
6
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of
Language’, Oppositions, vol. 3, 1974; revised for La sfera e il labirinto. Avanguardie e architettura da
Piranesi agli anni ’70, Einaudi, Turin, 1980, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno as Robert Connolly as The Sphere
and the Labyrinth: AvantGardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1987 and anthologised in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays, MIT Press
Cambridge, Mass., 1998, pp. 148–73. All quotations are from this latter source. On Tafuri’s work more
broadly, see Andrew Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History, A&S Books, Ghent, 2007.
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7
Compare Reinhold Martin, ‘Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism’, Harvard Design Magazine,
vol. 22, 2005, pp. 104–9 and Daniel Barber, ‘Militant Architecture: Destabilising Architecture’s
Disciplinarity’, Journal of Architecture, vol. 10, no. 5, 2005, pp. 245–53.
8
For instance, John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture, BBC Books, London, 1963; and
Paolo Portoghesi, Francesco Borromini: Architettura come linguaggio, Electa, Milan, 1967.
9
Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le boudoir’, pp. 157, 154. Compare Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Il frammento e la
città. Ricerca e exempla degli anni ’70’, Storia dell’architettura italiana, 1944–85, Einaudi, Turin, 1986,
pp. 146–59.
10
Fulvio Irace, ‘Milano’, in Storia dell’architettura italiana: Il secondo novecento, ed. Francesco Dal Co
Electa, Milan, 1997, pp. 74–5.
11
This is a pervasive theme of La sfera e il labirinto. Compare Tafuri’s contemporaneous essay
‘Borromini e Piranesi. La città come “ordine infranto”’ in Piranesi tra Venezia e l’Europa. Atti del
convegno internazionale di studio promosso dall’Istituto di storia dell’arte della fondazione Giorgio Cini
per il secondo centenario della morte di Giovan Battista Piranesi, Venezia, 13–15 ottobre 1978, ed.
Alessandro Bettagno, Leo S. Olschki, Florence, 1983, pp. 89–101.
12
Tafuri, ‘L’architecture dans le boudoir’, p. 148. Compare Tafuri, Five Architects NY, 3rd edn, Officina,
Rome, 1977, 1998, esp. ‘Les bijoux indiscrets’, pp. 7–33; see also Nadia Watson, ‘The Whites vs the
Grays: Re‐Examining the 1970s Avant‐Garde’, Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, Australia and New Zealand (hereafter Fabrications), vol. 15, no. 1, July 2005, pp. 55–69.
13
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1966; Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to NonPedigreed
Architecture, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott‐Brown and Steven
Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, rev. edn, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1972, 1977.
14
Tafuri, ‘L’architecture dans le boudoir’, p. 158.
15
Ibid., pp. 158, 152.
16
Emilio Ambasz (ed.), Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian
Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972. The exhibition was on show from 26 May to 11
September 1972. See also Alexandra Brown, ‘Operaismo, Architecture and Design in Ambasz’s New
Domestic Landscape: Issues of Redefinition and Refusal in 1960s Italy’ in Imagining ... Proceedings of the
27th International SAHANZ Conference, ed. Michael Chapman and Michael Ostwald Newcastle, NSW,
Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), 2010, pp. 52–7; and ‘A Night
at the Space Electronic, or the Radical Architecture of 1971’s Vita, Morte e Miracoli di Architettura’ in
Fabulation: Myth, Nature, Heritage, the 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand, ed. Stuart King, Anuradha Chatterjee and Stephen Loo Launceston, SAHANZ,
2012, pp. 147–57.
Brown and Leach—Between Noise and Silence
191
17
In recent years, Reinhold Martin and K. Michael Hays have pursued this theme from different
directions in, respectively, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London, 2008 and Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant Garde,
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2010. Compare Claire Zimmerman’s insightful review of these two titles:
‘Absent or Deferred? Utopia and Desire in Postmodern Architecture’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 34, no. 2,
2011, pp. 297–302. See also Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge,
Mass., MIT Press, 2011.
18
On this point compare Deborah van der Plaat, ‘“Architectural Ignorance and Public Indifference”:
Harold Desbrowe‐Annear’s Lecture on “Some Methods of Architectural Criticism” (1893)’, Fabrications,
vol. 19, no. 1, June 2009, pp. 162–75.
19
On the various claims made for architecture’s status as an art (and criticisms thereof), see also
Andrew Leach and John Macarthur (eds), Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts, A&S Books, Ghent,
2009. Compare Alexandra Brown, ‘Complexities, Discrepancies and Ambiguities: Assessing the
Disciplinarity of Herzog & de Meuron’s Architecture through Judd’s Generic Art’, EMAJ, vol. 4, 2009,
<http://www.melbourneartjournal.unimelb.edu.au/e‐maj> (accessed 12 August 2010).
20
Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 2006, pp.
5–8.
21
See, for instance, Steven Holl, Architecture Spoken, New York, Rizzoli, 2007; Scale, Zurich, Lars Müller
Verlag, 2011; Parallax, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2000, p. xxii. See the archdaily.com
project profile at <http://www.archdaily.com/135874/museum‐of‐ ocean‐and‐surf‐steven‐holl‐
architects‐in‐collaboration‐with‐solange‐fabiao/> (accessed 20 January 2012).
22
See the archdaily.com project profile at <http://www.archdaily.com/135874/museum‐of‐ ocean‐
and‐surf‐steven‐holl‐architects‐in‐collaboration‐with‐solange‐fabiao/> (accessed 20 January 2012).
23
Kieran Long, ‘Cité de l’Océan et du Surf’, Architect, vol. 100, no. 9, September 2011, p. 210.
24
Compare Bart Verschaffel, Architecture is (as) a Gesture, Quart, Lucerne, 2001.
25
Compare the discussions in Leach and Macarthur (eds), Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts; and
Joseph Rykwert, The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 2008.
26
See the archdaily.com project profile at <http://www.archdaily.com/13358/the‐therme‐vals/>
(accessed 31 January 2012). Also Sigrid Hauser, Peter Zumthor Therme Vals, Verlag
Scheidegger and Spiess, Zurich, 2007; and Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, 3rd edn, Basel,
Birkhäuser, 2010.
27
Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dan le boudoir’, p. 155. Tafuri cites from a speech recorded in Karl Krauss, In
These Great Times, Engendra Press, Montreal, 1976.
28
Roemer van Toorn, ‘The Sterile Pleasure of Negation’, in The Specific and the Singular: Architecture in
Flanders, 2008–2009 Yearbook, ed. Gideon Boie, Kristiaan Borret, Ilse Degerickx, Maarten Delbeke,
192
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Dieter De Clercq, Janina Gosseye, Andre Loeckx, Jan Mannaerts, Katrien Vandermariliere and Koen Van
Synghel, Flemish Architecture Institute, Antwerp, 2010, pp. 79–85.
29
Aleksandr Bierig, ‘Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen: A Belgian Firm Asks Old Questions in New
Ways’, Architectural Review, vol. 197, no. 12, December 2009, p. 81. Compare the image‐essay Office
Kersten Geers David Van Severen, ‘De Compositie van het Beeld: Over het Geconstrueerde Beeld als
Gereedschap van de Architectuur’ in Over Schoonheid: Hedendaagse Beschouwingen bij een Klassiek
Begrip, ed. Marc Verminck, A&S Books, Ghent and de Buren, and 2008, following p. 88.
30
Marcel Mauer, interview with Kersten Geers and David Van Severen, GizmoWeb,
<www.gizmoweb.org/2012/03/> (accessed 7 July 2012). Bart Verschaffel astutely points to the legacy
in this respect of architecture’s deconstructive turn, which coloured the formative years of these
architects, in ‘Ver Voorbij de Deconstructie. De Architectuuropvatting van Office Kersten Geers David
Van Severen’, De Witte Raaf, vol. 25, no. 148, November–December 2010, pp. 7–10.
31
van Toorn, p. 79.
Brown and Leach—Between Noise and Silence
193