Rooms of Sound. Three Examples of Architecture to Listen to, Plus One

As part of the research entitled “Ambiances, Rooms and other Sound Spaces. A Research between Music and Architecture”, has as its goal to study and to design multisensory sound environments, and to analyze the compositional process in its structural aspect. In sound environments, there is no prevalence of container and content and a coincidence of multi-significant spaces in the design theme is striving. Rooms of Sound and Sound Environments are therefore places-non-places in which boundaries merge and confuse in a continuous approach as free territories in which an event-action, that coincides with the project idea, takes place. In this journey through the (very ancient) relationship between music and architecture to retrace its history, is not on purpose, but to present three examples of sound architectures developed in recent decades, which I consider paradigmatic for a use of sound as a building material. The trip takes us to Dresden, to study the Funnel Wall, the second stop on the journey is Zadar, where Nikola Bašić conceived the Sea Organ on the edge of the Croatian city's waterfront, and ends in Paris, to immerse in Bernard Leitner’s Cylindre Sonore that is hidden in the thick bamboo forest of the park of La Villette. These three case studies anticipate a journey of desire, a design intention, the idea that led to the experimentation that the composer of music Fabio Cifariello Ciardi and I called Vedere Oltre (See Beyond), a nomadic project, which in addition to investigating a re-configuration of the environments making use of sound as a constructive, technological, design element, like the other materials of architecture, becomes a screen and a framework for a multisensory exhibition in which all the places and people, spectators and musicians, projected inside the canvas and on the walls of the three-dimensional frame, which alludes to the fourth dimension, are shown together, to witness the staging of architecture in the different sites that will host this musical architecture.