CAN THERE BE NOISE ARCHITECTURE?

 Art Pavilion in Salzburg, Austria by SOMA

We begin listening to our environment as a fetus in our mother's womb.

Listening is done by the sensation through our flesh and developing body.
Rightfully , the ear drums were still forming.

Imagine listening to the drum beat of the mothers heart, every breath through the lungs, every bum created by walking,  the vocal chatter and the squishing of intestine and other organs, all transferred by the 60% water of the mother's body. This would have been the noise we first heard as a fetus.

Noise however, is still delivered in cycles in term of heartbeat, breathing, pace and even from machinery like the fridge that buzz from its compressor comes together like a multi-tracked orchestra with all instruments  playing at different beats, tempo and time signature. They also exist in a variation of tone, colour and texture.

Noise in some way is a very complex classical piece using instruments with a larger spectrum of microtones.
So complex you generalize this as white noise referring to a lack of phylogenetic pattern in comparative data.

The process of making architecture itself is a noisy one.You firstly have the confusion of managing the site in relation to the brief while the climate and form need interface. You may also have decision chatter that propagate between many committees of the client or perhaps the chatter between consultants and builders.

All these happening like muti-tracked process running in their own time signature and tempo. There are other aspects of noise that can be explored:

1. ASYNC - if a given space can have various events / program / function happening at the same time having thier own respectetive agendas, this space would need to accomodate an indeterminate quality of use.

2. SYNETHESIA - Overlapping of programs to form new meanings. This new meaning takes on some focus or perhaps create a in new quality in experience.

3. POLY RYTHMIC - Not necessarily "noisy" as polyrythm do coincide intentionally but may have separate time signatures. So within a given space you can have multiple pace of life. An indication of pace of life has a lot to do with scale. So perhaps within a given space, mismatched scale can co-exist.

4. REVERBERATION AND ECHO -  Bouncing of sound being reverberation or echo will give more interference to the original sound. This would be more complex to comprehend. Receiving this bounced sound is like getting the information late thereby from the past. Noise in architecture can therefore involve the past. Already the type of material in its manner of construction evokes the past. Say for example cast iron pipes which lost popularity in the 70's but became sorted after recently because there is less audible sensation of water gurgling througth them because they have a thicker and stiffer circumference.

5. DISTORTION - In sound engineering, when a tone is altered into square wave, this is technically called distortion of tone. In architecture, our space is simplified from our organic ergonomics into square spaces.

When the resultant architecture appears simplified, stylized and give clarity, we fondly call it frozen music.

To achieve frozen music there is a decluttering processing in all steps of making architecture.
This means you need to synthesize the issues and further simplify them.

Frozen music however, is still subjected to noise even after completion. The same noisy processes still act upon this fronzen music asking for an addition in space or a change with the end user behavior.

So i ask again, can there be noise architecture ?

 designed by Ryan Browne, Nathanael Dunn, Daniel Nelson, Benjamin Scholten