Attention Audio Journal for Architecture

In Episode 1, Anna Goodman explains how contemporary architects in the United States often pursue community-engaged work through the design of processes. Analysis from the architectural historian Susanne Cowan helps demonstrate how this contrasts with early modern designers' strong association of community and territory. The episode features excerpts from interviews with Jeff Hou, Maria Sykes and Mary Comerio as well as audio recordings of the work of Louis Mumford.

In Episode 2, Anna Goodman describes a shift in the way architects in the United States viewed community starting in the early 1960s. Using audio clips from participants in an experimental park and playground built under that leadership of the influential community designer Karl Linn, it documents a transition from practices that linked community to the space of the neighborhood to those that focused instead on process.

In Episode 3, Anna Goodman explores how a focus on the process of design over its products located community design at the intersection of anti-institutional activism and other social movements. It focuses on a series of events catalyzed by the construction of Berkeley's People's Park, using audio clips of participants provided by the Pacific Radio Archives, the documentary Design as a Social Act as well as commentary from the urban and architectural historian Anthony Raynsford.

In Episode 4, Molly Esteve describes the life and work of the architect and environmental justice advocate Carl Anthony. Using Anthony's own words and commentary from Jah Sayers, the episode demonstrates how the Black radical tradition pushed designers and planners beyond the neighborhood to a metropolitan approach to community liberation.

This piece asks the question: “what is theory?” It begins by attempting to define “theory” as a term or as a concept, a task that involves addressing ideas of abstraction, generalization, science, discourse, language and rhetoric, as well as the persistent oppositions between theory and practice, theory and history, theory as engaged and instrumental or theory as reflective and critical.

This piece asks the question: “what is architectural theory?” It asks what the phrase “architectural theory” names for us, how architectural theory differs from theory per se, and what are its distinctive features that might remain the same despite changing historical epochs.

This piece addresses the question “how has architectural theory changed over time?” In particular, it explores the longue durée of two millennia of architectural writings in the west. In doing so the piece addresses the historicality of architectural theory in the western tradition. It asks what the big paradigm changes are that architectural theory has gone through, how it was different in earlier centuries to now, and whether there are different genres, formats, media, or dominant questions and problems that have defined it in different epochs.

This piece asks “is architectural theory Western or can it be global?” This means asking: is theory universal or is it geographically particular? Is theory inherently linked to Western notions of reason, philosophy, metaphysics, historical thought, and critique? And what is the relationship of theory to other modes of thought such as rhetoric, myth, symbolism, proverbs, moral and teachings?

This piece asks “how do you teach architectural theory?” We ask what are the ways that each person teaches architectural theory in their specific classroom and in their specific school? How do they approach this as a pedagogical challenge? Do they approach architectural theory as something to survey or to explicate (chronologically, thematically, or philosophically), or as something to do, to demonstrate, or to perform in the classroom? And what are the methods that each person uses in the classroom to teach architectural theory?

This piece asks “what are architectural theory classes for?” What is the purpose of the architectural theory class in relation to architectural design in the curriculum? What is the purpose of the architectural theory class in relation to the formation of the student—their ethical awareness, citizenship, the engendering of their “critical thinking,” even the cultivating of their souls? What is the impact of architectural theory classes on architectural practice once students graduate and work as architects? And does architectural theory make architecture better; both in studio and in the world?

This piece asks “is architectural theory dead?” This might seem a strange question to ask given the lengthy discussion throughout the issue. Yet, at the turn of the millennium, a new generation of architectural theorists declared the “end of theory.” Nearly two decades on, a different generation addresses this question again, and asks why there was a perception of decline twenty years ago and whether or not, from our vantage point, this assessment is correct.

What is music like without the sound of a space? Historian Emily Thompson discusses the aesthetics, technology and politics of spatial absence at the dawn of the recording era while John and Susan Edwards Harvith explain how musicians coped with, adapted to and sometimes thrived in the acoustically dead confines of the recording studio.

In the 1950s, classical record producers were fixated on realism, aspiring to put listeners in the ‘best seat of an acoustically perfect hall.’ Not so for John Culshaw, however, a maverick producer who used new stereophonic technology to produce operas that were more dramatic, more spatially immersive and (so he claimed) more faithful to a composer’s intentions. Sonic highlights from Culshaw’s producing career accompany a reading from his two memoirs, ‘Ring Resounding’ and ‘Putting the Record Straight.’

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.

This piece is a roundtable discussion on the Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” examining its relevance today in our ongoing condition of media change in which attention and distraction are at the forefront of current concerns. The discussion was between Mike Jennings, Professor in the German Department at Princeton University and author of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life; Michael Wood, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University and author of Habits of Distraction; and Thomas Levin, Professor in the German Department at Princeton University and curator and co-author of CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. The discussion was moderated by Daniela Fabricius, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute.

This piece is an interview with Harry Francis Mallgrave, author of The Architect’s Brain : Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture (Wiley, 2009). It addresses the past and present of the relationship between architecture and ideas about perception.

This piece is an interview with Mark Johnson, author of Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (Basic Books, 1999). It addresses the implications for new findings in neuroscience for our ideas about embodiment.

This piece is an interview with Sylvia Lavin, author of Form Follows Libido Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (MIT, 2004). It addresses Lavin’s observations and criticisms surrounding the issue of architectural attention today.

This piece is an interview with Tim Holmes, Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. It addresses Holmes research on new developments in attention-tracking technology.

This piece is an interview with the outgoing Dean of Princeton University, Stan Allen. It addresses his education and training as an architect,  assessment of Princeton University School of Architecture, and its prospects for the future.

This piece is an interview with the incoming Dean of Princeton University in 2012, Alejandro Zaera-Polo. It addresses his assessment of the school at this time and his vision for it going forward.

This piece is an interview with Jaffer Kolb by Alek Beirig. It addresses curation of the 2012 Venice Biennale, Common Ground by David Chipperfield.

This piece is an interview with the architect Francois Leininger about his research into the history of presidential libraries.

This is an experimental sound piece by Daniel Perlin, a sound artist living and working in New York. It is an exploration of deep listening based upon Pauline Oliversos’s book Software for People: Collected Writings 1963-1980 (Sharon: Smith Publications, 1984)

This piece is a Building Review of SANAA, Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006)  by Joseph Bedford.