bblesser's blog

As Juhani Pallasmaa the famous Finish architect has argued, we experience traditional and modern spaces with all of our senses, becoming sensory architecture. In my recent MIT Press book, Spaces Speak, Are Your Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture, I develop the concept of aural architecture, which is often ignored.

When sound is considered as part of architecture, it is almost always treated from the perspective of sound physics and spatial acoustics rather than from the human experience of listening. In this examination of sound, aural architecture considers the social, cultural, psychological, behavior, and artistic experinece of space by listening. Creating the aural experience of space is central to all sounds because they and the listener always exist in a space. Spaces changes sound in profound ways. The discussion establishes the language of aural architecture and then applies it to many cultures over the millennia. See www.SpacesSpeak.com, or the attached downloadable files, for more information about the concepts.