On Site Review Call for Contributions

On Site Review # 28 will be devoted to the theme of ‘Architecture and Sound.’ In addition to articles, photographs, and drawings, the journal will also incorporate a sound exhibition tentatively titled sonic/tech/tonic. Joseph Heathcott will curate the sound compilation.

Architecture and Sound have always been closely entwined through a range of modes, materials, scales, and practices. At one level, architecture experiments with and controls for sonic results. The high-buttressed walls of Gothic cathedrals amplify human song to the God-register. The barrel vaults of Romanesque chambers and the parapet seams of Andalusian palaces conduct whispered breaths to unseen ears. Clustered skyscrapers force the wind like a bellows. Carefully articulated panels dampen and direct the flow of sonic waves through concert halls. The city’s buildings and bridges resonate with the febrile vibrations of innumerable signals.

At another level, sound comprises an architecture in its own right, with physical laws of constraint, materials of production, sensory registration, and spatial form. If architecture presents pre-discursively through figure and ground, sound does so through signal and noise. The visible realm of architecture is only a faster vibration of waves than sound; both can be revealed through analogue and digital technologies. Architecture projects planes and volumes beyond the envelope of the building; sound projects signals beyond the register of the human ear. Architecture encompasses a world of discourses, signs, and practices; buildings are but one instantiation of architecture. Sound is the apprehended and digested signal that emerges from the cloud of audible and inaudible noise that constantly surrounds us.

The sound project sonic/tech/tonic seeks contributions that explore the multifaceted, polymorphous, and unstable relationship between architecture and sound. Contributors are encouraged to deploy the medium of sound to examine this relationship in several modalities: sound as architecture, architecture as sound, the sounds of architecture, the architectures of sound, and so forth. Or just surprise us with something non-categorical! Contributions can be archival or newly composed, but in all cases should meditate on the intersections of architecture and sound.