Leeds School of Architecture organises an Open Lecture Series, which platforms a number of speakers on a diverse range of topics. The lectures occur on Wednesday evenings in the undergraduate architecture studio area. The first talks were this Wednesday 16th October, with Alan Dunn and Alex de Little both talking about sound in relation to architecture.
Poster for the Leeds School of Architecture Open Lecture Series Autumn 2019
In particular, the topics which Alex de Little spoke about were of great interest to me in relation to my Context: Thesis module – a 9000 word assignment due in mid-December. My Context: Thesis is currently at an interesting point, as the 3000 word Context: Stasis, which will form the grounding for this piece of work, was submitted in the semester before summer, but since then further research has evolved those ideas and suggested possible new directions for the research.
My Stasis topic was Connecting People with Place: Through Place-Specific Dance. This was a topic which I enjoyed, but I feel that I may want to readjust the scope and focus so that it looks beyond solely dance, and instead focuses on how interventions in the public realm can provoke both short and long term impacts in people, communities and urban settings.
View of part of my Context: Stasis
One of the major themes of de Little's talk was that the eye is dominant as the "primary space" in western culture – something which Finnish architect Pallasmaa has written about. De Little also noted that, compared to sight, we have a very limited sonic vernacular, meaning that we find it hard to describe sounds or how spaces are acoustically and sonically, even when we do want to.
On a related note, de Little commented that the most acoustically interesting spaces to be found are the "forgotten spaces", because in the main, important spaces, acoustic damping is specifically designed in. De Little's research involves getting people to focus on their aural sense and experiencing architectural spaces specifically through this.
Photograph from one of Alex de Little's workshops into heightening people's ability to experience space through sound
After the lecture, I went and spoke with Alex de Little about my research, and he was kind enough to give me some references and further ideas that related more closely to the area of research that I was looking into. Some of these were the work of Theatrum Mundi, the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre (which I have been engaging with recently, indirectly, through some of David Harvey's writing), and the Turner Prize winning project Granby Four Streets by Assemble. I'm interested to see how these references might shape the direction of my research over the coming weeks.
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