Soundspace: A Manifesto

ABSTRACT

The manifesto is a long-standing and powerful tool for challenge within architecture, deployed by those as diverse as Vitruvius and Frank Lloyd Wright (who proposed a Walt Whitman-inspired “Work Song” of 1896) to those publishing in blogs across the designing planet today. Manifestos are locations for dreaming, for the banging of shoes, for passion in words about the environment we invent. Our manifesto follows in that tradition of poetry and critical optimism in calling for a new architecture of soundspace.

Here we wish to act as Markus Miessen’s “uninvited outsider” (Miessen 2010), a transgressive voice that disturbs the status quo beyond comfortable familiarity and brings together different types of thinkers and various modes of critique.[1] In this article we seek to probe “fundamental questions about how and for whom the built environment is produced and … conventional frameworks or oldestablished rules and regulations” through the interdisciplinarity that sound studies demands.[2] The ear to transgression is open.[3]

Keywords:

• architecture and sonic arts
• transgression
• manifesto
• soundscape

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gascia Ouzounian

Dr Gascia Ouzounian (B.Mus., M.Mus., McGill University; Ph.D., University of California, San Diego) is a lecturer in the School of Creative Arts at Queen's University Belfast. Her writing on experimental music and sound art appears in such journals as Leonardo Music Journal, Organised Sound, and Journal of Visual Culture, and the edited volumes Buried in Noise and Music, Sound and Space.

Sarah A. Lappin

Dr Sarah A. Lappin (B.A. Columbia, M.Arch. Princeton, Ph.D. University of Ulster, RIBA) is an architect who teaches theory and design at Queen's University Belfast. She is cofounder of the All-Ireland Architectural Research Group, and is the current chair of the steering group of the Architectural Humanities Research Association. Dr Lappin's research interests include architecture and identity and twentieth-century architectural history. Her recent publications include the book Full Irish: New Architecture in Ireland (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), and she is part of the research team for the Irish pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale for Architecture.