Audio Essay: A Pause Is Not A Break

Here There Be Dragons

As many of you know, in addition to hosting and producing Here There Be Dragons, I also teach architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. And for the past year, I’ve been working on A Pause Is Not A Break. An exhibition for the architecture department about the intersection of sound and architectural practice. Learn more at https://www.htbdpodcast.com/apauseisnotabreak. A PAUSE IS NOT A BREAK In architecture, we the practitioners of the built environment, have turned over our mode of communication so entirely to visual mediums, that we have been accused on many occasions of being poor listeners, poor readers, and perhaps, at the base of it, poor perceivers. What does the axonometric, the plan, the section, the elevation, the detail, the model miss? What have we failed to render in our visual pursuits? The medium of audio may seem like a privation, cutting us off from the images we use to make meaning but in sound there is a representation of liveliness that standard architectural drawings cannot always capture, and in many cases, actively avoid or sanitize. Unlike the eye, which has a natural defense against that which it does not wish to absorb, the ear has no such mechanism. It is difficult to close the ear without great effort. It requires instead a type of concentration that creates hierarchies of the sonic information that surrounds us. And so, sound becomes a ubiquitous medium––perhaps the most ubiquitous sense in space––taking on through its mundane repetitions a significant part of how we, the users of the built, make sense of space. How can we train the architect’s ear onto the issue of occupation, and so history, and so life? Perhaps the tools of repetition and invocation can remind us of what we know, what our minds have been storing all our lives. Special thanks to Adriene Lilly, Mohammad Golabi, Amy Kulper, Katy Rogers, Karen Bell, Carlos Medellin, Aine Guiney, Alex Eckman-Lawn, Uthman Olowo, Alia Varawalla, and of course the Design Research Seed Fund.