Architectural Synaesthesia - Prof. M. Schaut and Prof. D. Bucsescu

I am interested in synaesthesia as a means of structuring experience and moving through structures of experience. Sensory perceptions are personal, for example, two people may disagree on the taste of a bottle wine, one claiming it to be sweet while the other bitter, but it is in identity where agreement occurs and neither will disagree that they are drinking wine (common sense). I see synaesthesia/cross modal association as a deeper and more personal layer into understanding what we perceive one that is developed through rich sensory experience. It is a further degree of understanding how we relate to the world. The "thingness" of a thing is the degree that we sensoraly interact with a thing at the scale which we inhabit.

I am specifically interested in sound as a character and a constituent in spatial dialogue. Sound is a movement, a reaction to some kind of force, and I believe that it is important for a building to speak, both in the instance and over time.

Additionally, I have been thinking about how objects persist through time and how this gives rise to transmutations and transformations of their sensory precepts. For instance, Mammoth Cave (largest cave in the world), in Kentucky, has within it a network of rivers, waterfalls, and lakes. Throughout time, these continue to erode away at the limestone interior, causing the wind that passes through to play different notes through time.

Also, in the endurance of architecture, when does ruin occur, and in its design, should there be an act of a deconstruction of a sort that occurs in order to create an oscillation between the preservation of the old and pursuance of the new? Let’s say a skyscraper is built tomorrow, and we can accurately predict that it will be knocked down in 80 years because of one reason or another. What if over time, the building was designed to sink or be disassembled to a point in order to facilitate a dialogue through the history of it as an object, instead of after the decision to build a new building is made, an extensive effort is made to completely remove any trace of the previous building from the earth.

Upon reading Pallasmaa’s Eyes of the Skin, I think that the possibility for the creating cross modal associations has been all but drained from society by the domination of the image and the direct connection to the idea that follows it, essentially devoid of cross modality. I previously used the hypothetical example of the building that was deconstructed or sank down to its ruins as a bridge to the idea of an additional possible layer of cross modal association, that of how does synaesthetic association combine with understanding of the history of thing help us experience cross modally what might not be present but can be conceived in our inner networkings? Cross modality may be the key to experiencing the “thingness” of a thing from a different time. For instance, what if there was a very old column that endured a war, and through the touch and sight of its ruined surface, one can “hear” the clash of bursting steel arms?

So, all this needs refinement, but it’s getting there. For Tuesday, I want to construct a thing that incorporates some of my ideas about sound related dialogue between buildings/objects and people. The idea is a bit sketchy right now, but I want to build something that its purpose is to be moved, and through the specific engagement that facilitate and persistence of movements, the object and its sounds change. I will post later this weekend when I clarify my ideas a bit more about what i want to build.