Listen Carefully
All cultures are dominated by a chosen sense. In the West, sight is dominating. What kind of qualities could we revive if hearing was just as noble? What would happen if we actually started to listen?
All cultures are dominated by a chosen sense. In the West, sight is dominating. What kind of qualities could we revive if hearing was just as noble? What would happen if we actually started to listen?
By The Empty Square
Photo: Chris Reyem/Unsplash
All cultures are dominated by a chosen sense. In the West, sight is dominating.
Building on the sensuous hierarchy of Aristotle, sight is regarded as the most noble of the senses, followed by hearing, smelling, tasting and, in the end, feeling.
Living in a sight-dominated culture means responding to the world in an abstract and distanced way. Seeing doesn’t involve our feelings so much: You may see the slum through the bus window, but although you register its ugliness, you don’t grasp the magnitude of it, before you open the window and get the stench in your face.
When we only look, we are but tourists on sightseeing.
According to Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, the sight domination has had a significant impact on architecture. It has created a sensuous imbalance that tends to isolate and alienate us. It has weakened our empathy, passion, and involvement, leading to an architecture expressing nihilism and narcissism by isolating and excluding the body.
Is he right?
What if, instead, we focused on, for example, hearing?
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, churches, cathedrals, and private mansions were built with great attention to the acoustic qualities. The spaces were instruments on which to play. In the interaction with the echo and resonance of the space, new kinds of music and chanting were created and constantly refined.
Photo: Josh Applegate/Unsplash
Think about how the soundscape of a shopping street loses life and vibrancy as soon as it is covered with glass.
Think about the magic that arouses when a snow blanket muffles the sounds of the city.
What kind of qualities could we revive if hearing was the most noble of the senses? What would happen if we actually started to listen?
This note is inspired by: Juhani Pallasmaa: The Eyes of the Skin – Architecture and the Senses (1995) - Yi-Fu Tuan: Topophilia. A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, And Values (1974) - and Steen Eiler Rasmussen: Experiencing Architecture (1957)
Places That Are Truly Alive (4)
Places that are truly alive stimulate our senses just right – not too much and not too little.
Places that are truly alive stimulate our senses just right – not too much and not too little.
By The Empty Square
Photo: Vidar Nordli-Mathisen/Unsplash
Places that are truly alive stimulate our senses just right – not too much and not too little.
Too few or too many stimuli are equally bad, prompting negative behavioral consequences. Actually, our experiences are remarkably deteriorated, not only when we find ourselves in decidedly unattractive but also in neutral, boring, ‘normal’ surroundings.
According to several studies, there is a close connection between the sensory experiences that are received and the development of the mammalian brain.
Likewise, the degree of beauty in our surroundings is directly linked to our behavior and also our job performance.*
Did you know that the brain of a rat physically shrinks and grows in response to certain experiences? And that, when placed in a super-enriched environment, its intelligence increases?
The main factor is stimulation. Nerve cells are designed to receive stimulation. And everything – lighting, noise, odors etc. – appear to influence the behavior.
The right amount of stimuli to the human brain is estimated to be 1000 per hour. That is one every 4 second. With a walking speed of 4,5 km per hour, the perfect street presents something new every 4 or 5 meters. That is exactly what the streets in many medieval towns do. Four or five meters equal the width of a typical house in old towns, and the variations in appearance from building to building provide the stimuli we need.**
Photo: sterlinglanier Lanier/Unsplash
So forget about big-box-structures, supermarkets with blank walls, facades reproducing themselves until eternity. Forget about standardization. Our brains shrink from it, and it’s not what we need.
An essential task it to reinvent urban environments where we are being stimulated just right.
When was the last time you found yourself in such a place?
*Read Tony Hiss’ great book The Experience of Place (Vintage, 1991 (orig.1990))
** Numbers from Gehl Architects
The Price Of Comfort
In ancient Rome, the entrance of any kind of vehicle into the city was forbidden from sunrise to sunset. After dark, the streets were flooded with carts creating an infernal noise, causing sensitive citizens to suffer from eternal insomnia.
In ancient Rome, the entrance of any kind of vehicle into the city was forbidden from sunrise to sunset. After dark, the streets were flooded with carts creating an infernal noise, causing sensitive citizens to suffer from eternal insomnia.
By The Empty Square
Photo: Gabriella Clare Marino/Unsplash
In ancient Rome, the entrance of any kind of vehicle into the city was forbidden from sunrise to sunset. After dark, the streets therefore were flooded with carts creating an infernal noise, causing sensitive citizens to suffer from eternal insomnia.
To reduce the noise, people had to shut the windows. Windows, however, were not made of glass, but could be closed only by shutters, meaning that they excluded not only sounds, but also light and sight.
“The price of comfort was in effect the exclusion of the world”, as the Chinese-American geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, writes.*
To what degree are we today excluding the world when trying to wrap ourselves in comfort 24/7?
To what degree does contemporary Western society foster a tendency to deny or suppress our awareness of reality? Does it condition us to protect ourselves from difficulties and discomfort?
What is the price of comfort today?
How can we embrace closeness with all aspects of life in our cities?
*Yi-Fu Tuan: Topophilia. A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, And Values (University of Minnesota, 1974), p.180
Sense And The City
Close your eyes. Imagine yourself in a Medieval town or city. Stand still and listen. The noise is infernal.
Close your eyes. Imagine yourself in a Medieval town or city. Stand still and listen. The noise is infernal.
By The Empty Square
Photo: Aman Upadhyay/Unsplash
Close your eyes.
Imagine yourself in a Medieval town or city.
Stand still and listen. The noise is infernal. Fish! Meat! Honey! Onions! Cheese! Street criers are all over.
“The baths are open, the water is hot!”
“Mr. Jones died yesterday…!”
The news is shouted out, goods are being offered for sale everywhere, noise from workshops, animals, vehicles, and people, all of it blending into a cacophony.
And the smells. Strong smells from animals and humans. Smells from bakeries, tanneries, butchers. Dead meat and blood, smoke and incense, the smell of food being prepared and that of putrefaction. In this kind of place, you will probably be able to find your way around, using only your nose.
Now open your eyes again.
Photo: Blake Wheeler/Unsplash
Living in Denmark, a walk in a city or town will not provide any cacophonies whatsoever and hardly any smells. There is noise, of course, but really, the experience is mainly visual.
In Hungry City, Carolyn Steel describes the sensuous loss of a city where small food stores and markets close in favor of big supermarkets. After returning from a trip to India, which attacks the senses of most Westerners, it is not India, but Europe that is the real shock. Steel writes:
“The streets seem positively deserted; the cars and buses impossibly large and shiny; the spaces between buildings huge and empty. Everywhere you look, there seems to be an absence of something: of people, animals, vegetables, smell, noise, ritual, necessity, death. The juxtapositions of human life have been designed out of our cities, leaving us to live in an empty shell”.
Do you live in an empty shell? Should we reintegrate the juxtapositions of human life?
*Again, we warmly recommend Carolyn Steel: Hungry City (Chatto & Windus, Random House, 2008). Quote p. 117
Inhabiting Time: An Interview With Anupama Kundoo
Architecture is usually perceived as a spatial discipline. What happens if time becomes the primary dimension?
Architecture is usually perceived as a spatial discipline. What happens if time becomes the primary dimension?
By The Empty Square
Architecture is usually perceived as a spatial discipline. What happens if time becomes the primary dimension?
With time as the starting point, Indian architect Anupama Kundoo examines the question of individual responsibility and potential in the shaping of our surroundings.
Building on Indian traditions, Kundoo offers a vision for future architecture founded on tactility and the human scale. She challenges the Western motto, “time is money”, and reflects on the costs of “saving time” in the building process.
At what cost have we saved time? And who is responsible for the consequences?
Nurturing The Senses: An Interview With Helle Nøhr Holmstrøm
Beauty is called for! In this short video, architect and head of workplace strategy at Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, Helle Nøhr Holmstrøm, presents a precise reflection and statement upon the importance of aesthetically stimulating spaces.
Beauty is called for! In this short video, architect and head of workplace strategy at Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, Helle Nøhr Holmstrøm, presents a precise reflection and statement upon the importance of aesthetically stimulating spaces.
By The Empty Square
Hell Nøhr Holmstrøm. Photo: The Empty Square
“Beauty is called for.”
In this short video, architect and head of workplace strategy at Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, Helle Nøhr Holmstrøm, presents a precise reflection and statement upon the importance of aesthetically stimulating spaces.
Can we turn the lean thinking of our time upside-down? Can we exchange efficiency with extravagance and sensuous richness? Can we make life taste better?
The Art In Everything: An Interview With Khalid Albaih
We met Sudanese political cartoonist Khalid Albaih for a conversation on media, freedom of speech, and the importance of art; not the institutionalized, capitalized ‘art world’, but art as a human connection, as a base for society, and as a tool for revolutionizing old systems.
We met Sudanese political cartoonist Khalid Albaih for a conversation on media, freedom of speech, and the importance of art; not the institutionalized, capitalized ‘art world’, but art as a human connection, as a base for society, and as a tool for revolutionizing old systems.
By The Empty Square
Khalid Albaih. Photo: The Empty Square
Khalid Albaih is a Sudanese political cartoonist, civil rights activist, and freelance journalist who grew up as member of the Sudanese diaspora in Doha, Qatar. He has published his social and political caricatures and articles mainly in Arab and international online media, and his graphic art has also been publicly exhibited internationally. In 2019, he was awarded the Freedom Artists Residency by Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) in New York City.
From 2017 to 2021, Albaih has been living as an artist-in-residence with his family in Copenhagen, Denmark, under the ICORN programme. We had the privilege of meeting him for a conversation on media, freedom of speech, and the importance of art; not the institutionalized, capitalized ‘art world’, but art as a human connection, as a base for society, and as a tool for revolutionizing old systems.
The conversation has been made in collaboration with Danish PEN/PEN International.