Of ear buds and architecture

So what are you listening to while you pump CADD or rivet Revit? Currently there is an entire generation of designers that listen to something while working. At our office the majority of junior staff have earbuds firmly embedded. My generation did not have access to this technology. The studios in college were devoid of music, no decent radio stations and who wanted to schlepp their stereo system up three flights of stairs. No, we toiled away in relevant silence. Only to go back to our apartments after long hours in the studio to ‘feed our heads,’ thanks Grace.

Once in the work-a-day world offices were also usually devoid of music until the Walkman came along, but we weren’t really used to working to music at that point, why start now? In my experience the only exception to this rule was at Venturi’s office on Sundays. If you worked on Sunday and Bob was in the office, which was most of the time you were subjected to the opera all afternoon. Can’t say I ever developed a love for opera even after all those Sundays, no thanks Bob.

So, is there a connection between music and architecture? In 1839 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said “Music is liquid architecture, architecture is frozen music.” I was once explaining the window spacing on a building I worked on at VRSB to a friend and her young son who remarked that it was just like music. The kid later majored in music as an undergrad. Despite this precocious observation I have never really bought this argument. You certainly can have rhythm and cadence on a façade, but a song?

Buildings certainly shaped music over the course of history. Medieval churches and cathedrals had certain acoustic properties that lead to the development of Gregorian Chants, not so much in a wattle and daub hut. Mozart and the like wrote music for a variety of different particular venues each with their inherent acoustical qualities, these ranged from patron’s manor houses to various performing arts venues. Unfortunately, the latter had a habit burning down during this period so they were constantly being replaced each time with different acoustical characteristics. This is one of the reasons concert halls are so hard to design; it is very difficult if not impossible to reproduce the variety of acoustical environments classical music was written for in one performance hall. Even today popular music is written and performed with the type of venue in mind. Consider the big stadium concerts of the past couple of decades – you don’t hear folk music at Gillette Stadium, basically because you couldn’t. No, the loud hard rock of the 80’s and 90’s grew out of what sounded good in those massive venues – stadium rock. Heavy metal would make you ears bleed in a night club! If you are interested in this subject check out How Music Works by David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame.   

Left: Billie Holiday, Downbeat, New York, NY, February 1947 (William P. Gottlieb 04251). Image source: United States Library of Congress’s Music Division.
Right: Chyrsler Building 2005 via Wikimedia Commons. Image uploaded by Misterweiss.

Left: Ice-T with Body Count in 2006 via Wikimedia Commons. Image uploaded by Mohylek.
Right: Royal Ontario Museum via Wikimedia Commons. Image uploaded by Gisling.

So, can it work the other way? Can music influence the way you design? I know when I’m driving my car my speed varies with the type of music I’m listening to, get the Led out and off we go, Pink Floyd and it’s a little less frenetic, Miles Davis and I’m in the slow lane with truckers crawling into my trunk! Do you have your favorite music for road trips, to jog to, do yoga, or that special candlelight dinner? Do we believe that certain music puts us in the right frame of mind for a given task or occasion? Could there be a connection between what one listens to and what we end up designing. Was there a connection between jazz in the 30’s and Art Deco, post-war brutalism and … well maybe they were tone deaf, the swinging 60’s and the Beatles and postmodernism, gangsta rap and de-constructivism in the 80’s? Is there a connection between an explosion of musical genres over the past decade or so and a proliferation of approaches to design today? 

Maybe yes, probably no. But surely our culture is not built around silos of artistic endeavor, especially in the interconnected world of the internet. Don’t the arts influence each other, music, theater, film/video, architecture, fashion and product design … the list goes on? Most of us live in an interdisciplinary society, we read books, go to the movies and museums, surf the web, some of us even read newspapers. Or is it all just a big melting pot that makes it near impossible to establish any connections? Trends, styles, revivals, even fads ebbing and flowing across our culture seemingly unrelated. I, for one, would like to believe it is all connected, one feeding on the other, messy and vital. So keep those ear buds firmly embedded and turn on, tune in and don’t drop out!