Lo-fi Architecture

Hi-fi architecture: a concert hall, a lecture room, a sound stage.  A great deal of acoustic engineering and formal design decisions goes into the production of these spaces. The remaining spaces we inhabit, the everyday architecture of hallways, kitchens, lobbies, and public streets--these are largely not designed from an acoustic standpoint.  Less than lo-fi, which would suggest some sort of technology for directing sound, the majority of our environments could be described as no-fi architecture.  Sound is often considered in the no-fi case to be an irritant, to be eliminated if it is to be paid attention to at all. 

Why bother with engineering an environment for precise listening  when the occupant--a passerby on the street, a visitor to your home or office, etc--is not engaged to listen as a concert hall goer might be.  The occupant of a no-fi environment must first have a desire to listen.

Rather than giving up on the no-fi environment, and while recognizing that design is a premium commodity which makes hi-fi architecture attainable only for user group who will pay for it, architecture, landscape, and sound intersect in an uncharted middle ground. I am calling this new ground "lo-fi architecture".

Hi-fi and lo-fi take their root in sound engineering, in both recording and playback.  In general we like our sound to be more authentic, more "true" to artist's intention which leads to a vast engineering effort to perfect the recording and equally perfect the dispersion of the sound into individual listening environments.  So why would anyone favor a "down-graded" sound, either intentionally stripped of its fidelity or of a lower quality due to a lack of economic means?

One answer to that question lies not so much in aesthetic preferences as it does in a punk, culture-jamming practice.   In lo-fi audio and music, this is exemplified by circuit bending. Circuit bending is the technique of modifying a circuit board to produce (or unleash) sounds that were previously "locked up" in the circuit.  Musicians and noise artists particularly enjoying warping toy keyboards and all manner of things.

Circuit bending as a material practice could translate up in scale to the built environment.   How can the landscapes we live in, which are becoming ever closer to being mass-produced, be re-wired or "bent" by the user?  Moving beyond the metaphor, designing for the sonic environment at large is a tangible domain for individual experimentation.

DEMILIT experiments acoustically with stormwater pipes on the street

Tinkering, rather than designing, is the mode of sonic reclamation of our built environment.  But even the tools of tinkering are designed--subwoofers, amplifiers, speaker wire.  Lo-fi architecture seeks to enable a building's occupants or a street's pedestrians to shape their experience, using the tools readily available on the market (the bombastic detritus of sound from a car amplifier escaping the car, for example).  Listening intently then to these un-listenable or otherwise uninteresting environments may just reveal a hidden soundtrack to our lives.  It may also tease out the politics of sound in the public arena - who controls sound, how is it controlled, and to what ends.  

The story of life is this: static

Give me 20 D Energizers.
20 C Energizers?
Not C, D. 
C Energizers?
D, motherfucker, D. Learn to speak English first, all right?
How many you say?
20, motherfucker, 20.
Motherfuck you.
Motherfuck you? You, you all right, man.

Traces of a Pre-Military Landscape

A definite sonic quality to this 1932 aerial view of San Francisco Bay.  Found via.

Much has been made of exploring post-military landscapes, but what is to be said of the pre-military landscape?

For instance, survey the busy San Francisco Bay in the photo above, just a handful of years before the military began its massive transformation of the watery edge.  It is worth observing how well this landscape lent itself to being transformed by the military.  Alameda Airport, tucked away in the bottom left, was positioned adjacent to the Oakland shipping channel. Both sides of the mouth of this channel would become intensely militarized leading up to WWII.  In the middle of the Bay sits Yerba Buena Island before it and the unborn Treasure Island became militarized.

These peripheral spaces--the thickened crust at the city's edge--were fertile territories for projecting the city's and by extension, the nation's power.  The gridded financial district and the commercial vitality of Market Street depended on these militarized edges for protection and free trade.  Thus the landscape of the bay played a crucial role in projecting American power into the Pacific.

So a curious thing happens to the landscape then when that fountainhead of power withdraws its might.  There is a power vacuum.  An almost infinite array of possibilities arise, then, when the military departs suddenly, by act of congress or explosion of volcano.

This is a roundabout way of announcing my talk "The Post-Military Landscape Future" to be given at Architecture for Humanity's 848 Folsom St. office, at lunchtime on September 7th.  I will be speaking about my tour of US military bases around the world in 2009, focusing on bases closed and bases in transition.  The former military bases of the Bay Area formed a good part of my inspiration for setting out on this traveling fellowship.  AFH and the Open Architecture Network are gearing up to announce a competition on finding strategies for reclaiming military bases: [un]restricted access.  This is an unprecedented opportunity to collect knowledge and project possible futures for military landscapes around the world.

The second local event to announce is that DEMILIT will be leading a walk at the Headlands Center for the Arts on September 25th as a part of the program "Desire Trails".  We will be scraping sounds from the former Nike Missile site, now a Marine Mammal Center, across the lagoon from the old Army barracks in which the Headlands Center for Arts is sited.  Stay tuned to DEMILIT for more details on the event.

Concluding here, it is useful--necessary, even--to interpret the post-military landscape for clues to its pre-military nature.  For we cannot predict exactly how our contemporary landscape will shift due to future militarization.  We can, however, extrapolate from current and past transformations of space what it is that makes up a military landscape.  It is the task of DEMILIT and others to document that change.  The medium of sound, examined and projected here as part of the architectural practice called Soundscrapers, enables but one of many media which may expose these traces of militarization.

Military Pastoral

Busy times offline here at Soundscrapers.

Found in print only, on a newsstand somewhere, is an essay and set of drawings titled "Military Pastoral" in issue 138 of Frieze magazine.  In the article I write about two military landscapes with vastly divergent post-military paths:  Gettysburg, memorialized ad infinitum, and Palmanova, finding new life in its eroding geometries.

The Entropic Timepiece of Gettysburg Memorial Park

  

Last month, Places over at Design Observer published "Soundscape: Atlantikwal" with several tracks of bunker audio extracted from my military architecture tour of 2009.

Soundscrapers is also involved in a sonic excavation of Angel Island, in collaboration with the DEMILIT crew.  Stay tuned for an announcement on that front.