The Eyes of the Skin

50Adrian Stokes, the English painter and essayist, makes perceptiveobservations about the interaction'Like mothersof space and sound, sound and stone.of men, the buildings are good listeners. Long sounds,distinct or seemingly in bundles, appease the orifices of palaces that leanback gradually from canal or pavement. A long sound with its echobrings consummationto the stone,' he writes.10.J-Anyone who has half-woken up to the sound of a train or an ambulancein a nocturnal city, and through his/her sleep experienced thespace of the city with its countless inhabitantsscattered within its structures,knows the power of sound over the imagination;sound is a reminderthe nocturnalof human solitude and mortality, and it makes oneconscious of the entire slumbering city. Anyone who has becomeentrancedby the sound of dripping water in the darkness of a ruin canattest to the extraordinarycapacity of the ear to carve a volume into thevoid of darkness. The space traced by the ear in the darkness becomes acavity sculpted directly in the interior of the mind.The last chapter of Steen Eiler Rasmussen's seminal book ExperiencingArchitecture is significantly entitled 'Hearing Architecture'. 105 The writerdescribes various dimensions of acoustical qualities, and recalls theacoustic percept of the undergroundtunnels in Vienna in Orson Welles'film The Third lv/an: 'Your ear receives the impact of both the length andthe cylindrical form of the tunnel.' lOGOne can also recall the acoustic harshness of an uninhabited andunfurnished house as compared to the affability of a lived home, inwhich sound is refracted and softened by the numerous surfaces ofobjects of personalsound of intimacy or monumentality,life. Every building or space has its characteristicinvitation or rejection, hospitalityor hostility. A space is understood and appreciated through its echo asmuch as through its visual shape, but the acoustic percept usually remainsas an unconscious background experience.Sight is the sense of the solitary observel~ whereas hearing creates asense of connection and solidarity; our look wanders lonesomely in theTHE EYES OFTHE SKINdark depths of a cathedral, but the sound of the organ makes us immediatelyexperience our affinity with the space. 'vVestare alone at the suspenseof a circus, but the burst of applause after the relaxation of suspense unitesus with the crowd. The sound of church bells echoing through the streetsof a town makes us aware of our citizenship. The echo of steps on apaved street has an emotional charge because the sound reverberatingfrom surrounding walls puts us in direct interaction with space; the soundmeasures space and makes its scale comprehensible. We stroke theboundariesof the space with our ears. The cries of seagulls in the harbourawaken an awareness of the vastness of the ocean and the infinitenessof the horizon.Every city has its echo which depends on the pattern and scale of itsstreets and the prevailing architectural styles and materials. The echo ofa Renaissance city differs from that of a Baroque city. But our cities havelost their echo altogether. The wide, open spaces of contemporarystreetsdo not return sound, and in the interiors of today's buildings echoes areabsorbed and censored. The programmed recorded music of shoppingmalls and public spaces eliminates the possibility of grasping the acousticvolume of space. Our ears have been blinded.Silence, Time and SolitudeThe most essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquillity.Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced intomatter, space and light. Ultimately, architecture is the art of petrifiedsilence. 'vVhen the clutter of construction work ceases, and the shoutingof workers dies away, a building becomes a museum of a waiting, patientsilence. In Egyptian temples we encounter the silence that surroundedthe pharaohs, in the silence of the Gothic cathedral we are reminded ofthe last dying note of a Gregorian chant, and the echo of Roman footstepshas just faded away from the walls of the Pantheon. Old houses takeus back to the slow time and silence of the past. The silence of architec-PART 2 51