I wanted to write about architecture, not so much as a subset of sculpture, which is one way of looking at architecture, purely in its formal and material invention, but I saw it as I had since I was a child, as a thing intimately connected to how we live, who we are. Welcome to Archi-Exessions 1-1. I'm Amelia Taylor-Haukberg, and this week, January 18, 2016, I speak with Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times. I wanted to talk with Kimmelman specifically about a piece he had published just at the end of last year, called Dear Architects of Sound Matters.
The piece considers how an architectural space's unique audio atmosphere helps create its overall personality, invariably affecting us as we experience it. Alongside Kimmelman's writing in the piece are looped videos of different spaces. The New York Times's office, a restaurant, the High Line, Penn Station, a penthouse, and others, and these are meant to be viewed while wearing headphones to get to know that space's sonic portrait of source. Too often says Kimmelman architects don't think of sound as a material, like they would concrete glass or wood, when it can have a profound effect on the design's overall impact.
In our interview, Kimmelman shares how the piece came to be and how it fits into the times its overall push into more multimedia journalism. We also discuss how Kimmelman's role as a former chief art critic for The Times influences his architecture criticism, and how multimedia and VR may affect the discipline. Let's start out with this particular piece that Dear Architects Sound matters. This was published to a great bunch of positive response in the last couple of weeks, and I wanted to just ask, how did you get the idea for this particular type of piece?
Where did it come from? Well, it came really from a number of different places. I have a background in musician, and so part of me thinks about things like sound in space as an art director generally. It's always been a thought that's on my mind.
I'm aware of places where the sound is good or bad or in some way interesting. But I guess it was in the back of my mind, and then I began last year in 2015 to, I think there were ways to use the new digital tools at the times, so anxious to explore. So think about how they might express ideas about architecture and our experience of it that would go beyond what we've been able to do in the newspaper or even online up until now. So I began to think about using essentially one of the things you can do over the web, which is to listen, and then to try to use the form of writing an article as a way in which people could read along, not just with photographs or videos in this case, but with your book.
Did you actually happen on anyone viewing the article out in space if you were saying writing the subway or something like that, and you see someone on their smartphone flicking through the article with headphones and just by chance, do you ever come across something like that? Or have you been able to talk with people who are just readers about how they received the piece? Yeah, I've talked to a lot of readers. I can say that the New York City subways, as I mentioned in the article are really loud.
So they don't really have the best place to listen to a story, which is what you're doing listening to a story essentially, in which you're supposed to tell real differences between one kind of space and another. But yeah, people have responded in a really wonderful way with the kind of, you know, aha that I'd hoped. What I mean by that is, you know, I should say that it was actually talking years ago with Peter Zimtow, the Swiss architect whose architecture does involve so many senses, including sound and who has talked to me in the past about how he designed the basis for sound. And I remember when he started to talk to me about that, I had my own aha moments in some of his projects, you know, realizing that I was experiencing a place orally, not just in terms of space and to light and so forth.
And I think, you know, a lot of the satisfaction I got out of this was that people had that kind of aha thing like, oh, yeah, I realized that there is a way in which one kind of a door or another, one kind of a space or another has an effect on me, which has been unconscious, definitely affects my emotions and the ways in which I react to the places I move through. So that's really been the most important thing about this. And then as I said, also, I think just being able to convey to people a broader spectrum of the richness and complexity of the ways in which we understand and experience architecture, you know, that's also been part of the goal and I'm glad people got it. Yeah, it seems like a very compelling and obviously very exciting new form and format for a critic in any regard, but particularly in architecture to use and put into their toolkit of how they're presenting their interpretations and their criticism to the greater public and to reach as wide an audience as possible.
I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more than about on the process of putting the piece together and working with not just editors or people in the more traditional, critical, journalistic hierarchy, but like sound designers and other multimedia people that were working and putting the piece together. What was the kind of professional working relationship like for the piece? Yeah, you know, the team that I worked with, Alicia DeSantis and Graham Roberts and John Wang, who put this together under the leadership of a guy named Steve Duane, so there's a whole digital crew there at the time, just fantastic. I had worked with them on a review of the Whitney Museum, which opened us here as well.
And so we've been through this process before and when we did the Whitney, I sort of knew what I was going to say and I knew the kind of things I wanted them to try to express digitally. That had to do with moving through the building, situating it in a neighborhood, in the city, seeing the building not just as a two-dimensional photograph from different angles, but really as something that exists in space and that people experience space and time. And that was, again, something that you can do digitally. They did a remarkable job there and that was a lot of fun.
But after that, we said, let's continue working, but maybe we can do a project more from the ground top, not just you have this idea and we'll try to realize it. So I proposed sound and then we spent, to be honest with you, a lot of time, just kind of talking back and forth and I realized that I knew what I wanted to do, but it was difficult for them to see how it would really work digitally. This was one of the interesting things you can, about the project, that you can picture it from your perspective as a writer. But of course, that's not the same perspective as somebody who has to imagine creatively these digital tools that can express these ideas and in ways that they felt were creative from their point of view.
So actually, a lot of months past in which we would just sort of talk about it without figuring out what the best illustrations could be of this thought. And I have to credit them largely with coming up with the examples. I would provide them with lots of different kinds of examples, but they're the ones who really figured out how to express the difference between a trans-section in New York City and one in Paris and what the value of photographing, of filming and recording the sound of room in the public library would be. And I think that they came up with stuff like the Miraculous Moment in which there's a woman sitting in the office of the New York Times eating a potato chip, which one of these serendipitous wonderful things in that woman would very generously agree to last you, which from my perspective really make this article work.
I mean, in a way, my idea is kind of stupid, just like stupid because it's obvious, sound is a part of our experience of architecture and space. But then to really convey that in a way that's memorable, that was what they do. So we talked a lot, we would need, and they would show me stuff. And then in the typical way the journalism works, everything happened for the last minute, which would be fine in this case.
So when I saw the basic format of the piece, I imagined that there could have been other instances where you might have imagined doing things a little bit more impromptu and almost like a live streaming aspect of being able to check in these different stations or areas or different architectural forms at different times and be able to compare things in a much more spontaneous and therefore risky way. But what I did appreciate about the piece is that there are these loops of segments in each space. And so you do get into this kind of relaxed, and very reflective zone of really grooving on whatever it feels like to be in that space based very much on your frozen and visual perspective. You don't have the choice to look around.
You're not quite in that VR mode yet. But at that point of being able to be immersed orally, you are at least. So it's something that can be extremely affecting. And I think that the potato chip thing is what people, strangely a little bit divisive because people thought, oh, well, why would I want to hear that?
But it's like, well, by hearing that, that's what tells you what's significant about that space in the first place. Right. And we live in that space, exactly. Is that kind of an initial conspirator for this piece?
Are there other architects that you see working today that have a similar sensitivity towards sound? That's an interesting question because I think all architects would say on some level they care about sound. And there are architects. I mean, I've talked to a bunch about this.
And one of the really interesting thing was that they themselves would often call me back and say, actually, here's a case of something where I really think in terms of sound. I mentioned in the article Rick's video, it's called me back about places that actually had a powerful oral memory for him, which he hadn't thought of in the beginning. But Ms. Pardon was stiller than pointed out how in their design for Alice Tully Hall, the counter-haul, the concenter.
Not that the counter-haul itself was acoustically designed, which of course it is, and which is not really my point, but that they had thought about the ways in which he moved from the street into the lobby into another anti-room into the hall, and then that is a passageway, that then opens onto the counter-haul, and that sequence is a sequence, an oral sequence as well of different kinds of removals from the sound space you had occupied before to enter a completely new kind of sound space, the counter-haul. And Renzo Piano mentioned to me, he called me back as well after I'd asked him this question about how much to sound matter in his work, and he remembered having designed this cultural center in New Caledonia, celebrating Canok culture, and how it's really a series of pavilions, one of these kind of incomplete egg-shaped pavilions, each of which makes a different kind of sound, whereas the wind passes through it, a very purposeful part of the design that had to do with traditional kind of culture, and the way it sounds is an element in their architecture. So, I think that a lot of architects who on some level have incorporated issues of sound into their work, but I would still say that I think architects have so much on their plate, of course, and there's so many requirements and placed by the client and otherwise, and also some financial constraints, but very often, sound is not to make explicitly requested, I'd want to room with a certain kind of sound in it, it's hard even to know what to ask for, and then it's hard to design spaces, it's hard to model them, so that I think it's not really foremost in the architects' vocabulary, and I guess part of my desire was to say, look, somehow, this shouldn't be part of an architects' toolkit, the kind of thing that can create beautiful, meaningful space in the same way that we think about light and materials, which are inseparable in a sense from a sensational kind of sound. I don't think you would really run into many critics talking to architects knowing that that, trying to encourage that is something that is more valued, but I think you might run into issues of just, yeah, like you said, already so much on the plate, but I wonder then, when you were writing this piece and also just considering talking to architects, did you also speak to sound artists, because obviously you spoke with audio technicians or such or people who are acoustical engineers or so, but specifically in the world of art, did you speak with and get some information from people who identify as sound artists, and to distinguish what they do in terms of creating something like maybe sound sculptures or spaces with very specific sound atmospheres, as opposed to the architect who is concerned with those same questions.
You know, for years I wrote about art, and so of course I'm familiar with sound artists, but I didn't actually think about them very much because I, it wasn't really for me a question of whether it was possible to create distinctive spaces orally, but that every space in a sense has an oral personality, a trait for better and worse, and that the things that common everyday spaces need to be thought of a little more carefully, or in any case, that's unconsciously we experienced them on this level. So I wasn't looking for example so much for people who had identified sound as a way of though you're quite right to point out that it's making this issue clear, but I hadn't done that because I really wanted more for people to sense that this was not a special thing, that was an art project, or as I mentioned the article I think that was designed specifically for sound like a concert hall, or even a restaurant which is perhaps designed to make a lot of noise so that people feel they're in a busy, happy place. I wanted it to be perceived as something that exists in our lives all the time, and I have to also say that Zumtrel was important in another sense in pointing out, as I mentioned the article, that sound is a kind of almost unnoticed, but a plague like a part of our experience of cities today in the way the mail used to be in the Middle Ages. And so again, it was really a desire not to talk about the exceptional work or the artful effort, but the way in which it's something which once we realize it's there, we might begin to deal with in a more serious way.
One of the people who contacted me afterwards is doing a project in MIT on trying to see the way in which sounds can be used to control moods in places. That means, for instance, possibly playing certain kinds of music or sounds on, let's say, an airline in order to hasten the rhythm by which people be bored, or become people who are going into an MRI or such things, and which I thought was kind of interesting. And so there was this question that came up in the conversation which was, well, of course, how much is sound that's actually created for spaces? How much is that universally experienced?
You're calming new age music for a trip to the spa, maybe exactly what drives me completely mad. And how much are we aware of the sounds that we are piked in around us all the time, most of the time I think we're not, until the sound is removed. And so it's often the absence of sound, in fact, that is really most affecting. But it's hard to achieve, because in most places, most buildings, for instance, we have some kind of, I should say, most office buildings anyway, some sort of mechanical system which is constantly making noise in order to fake the notion of silence.
It's actually a noisy space, but it creates what we think we're not hearing, which is the background noise. Well, yeah, there's a couple of sensitivities going on. Of course, there's cultural sensitivities that you can, it's impossible to provide for every type of cultural sensitivity. So if you're planning for any type of public space, the idea of piping in, share versus some type of hardcore metal, and not everyone's going to be happy no matter what.
And oftentimes, at least I would like to say that for architects, I would think that the ideal sound is one that arises organically, that isn't necessarily prescribed upon the space, but that is created from a positive inhabiting of the space and activity of the space that is not overwhelming. So still you have a busy restaurant that where the noise and the atmosphere comes out of the activity. But I was wondering, particularly you mentioned because obviously we're the head art critic for the New York Times previously, the writing for architecture, and that seems to me to be an obvious link, but I was wondering if you could talk about what that transition was like more generally of switching from writing art criticism to architecture criticism, and also because of your own position as a concert pianist and having that kind of sensitivity. Sure.
Well, I was an art critic for a long time, but I kind of fell into that job in way. I studied art history and graduated school, and it was obviously something that I cared a lot about. But I started as an art critic when I was very young and really learned the job in public. So I spent a lot of time just, you know, the earlier it was just trying not to be a completed myself.
And then, you know, found a way to do the job, but I put it this way because, well, I came to love much of what I was doing and came to love and respect many artists and people in the world and so forth. I hadn't chosen that path actually. It was something that I just kind of happened in a very happy but unexpected way. And from an early age, I had, I grew up in Greenwich Village in New York and had always been interested in architecture and design and had edited between college and graduate school and the Architecture and Design magazine.
And so after I'd done the art job for a while, I got restless and was trying to do other things to keep it interesting for me, not just reviewing shows. And then I went to Europe, started a column, which was a attempt to return to some of my earliest ideas about why I wanted to write about culture, to connect culture, to politics and social affairs, and to see it as something that wasn't like, as the art world had become so connected to fashion and money, but something that was inextricably tied up with our identity and our fortunes in the true sense. And I loved doing that job of writing throughout Europe and the Middle East. So when the Architecture job came up, it was, in a certain sense, not a very unnatural transition for me.
It was, in a sense, returning to things that were fun, I considered fundamental and had always been my first interest. Of course, that's because I wanted to write about Architecture, not so much as a subset of sculpture, which is one way of looking at Architecture, purely in its formal and material invention, which is important and meaningful. But I saw it as I had since I was a child, and I went to shake up to neighborhood as a thing intimately connected to how we live, who we are. And my respect to Architecture and Architecture, and that includes planners and landscape architects and the whole wide profession, has to do with the fact that it is so complex and it involves so much in the way of politics and economics and social affairs, and it requires compromise and high principles and it determines our daily lives and it's a very public endeavor.
So all those things, in a certain sense for me, were a way of celebrating Architecture and its richness and were my first interest in the notion of culture as a journalistic endeavor. And it seems like a natural application for something like Multimedia Journalism to attach to self-architecture criticism, if indeed that can at least credit and give more credit or give more stronger legs to that kind of wide-birthed that you're talking about. I hope so. I agree with that, in the sense, certainly, consciously, in the sense that, for instance, in the Whitney Project II, say that the building that Rint of Canada designed there cannot entirely be understood through photographs which have, over the years, created a notion of what architecture should look like.
That's been a back-and-forth process, so that architecture which is considered interesting looks good in photographs. But my sense is that building actually is a rather interesting example of something that is hard to translate into photographs, it doesn't actually translate very well into two dimensions, and it's hard to understand, except three-dimensionally, and experienced inside and out and understood in relation to the surrounding neighborhoods. Otherwise, it looks kind of awkward and in co-a. So, yes, I think digital tools that are available do reinforce an idea which can be expressed through building like that of architecture as a part of our daily experience, the public life, and that it has to be understood as something three-dimensional and temporal and economic and social.
So then, do you have two-part question? Do you have any future plans for other multimedia, architectural, criticism projects that you'd like to develop at the times? And second part is that whether you are not able to use these things, say, if you're either for whatever reason, if you're stuck in specifically the written medium, what is the most important consideration that all architecture critics must keep in mind? Choose whichever one you'd like to start with.
So, of course, I'm excited about doing as many of these projects as we can, but as you can see, we got two done in one year. The people I work with have a lot on their play time. There's not all they're doing. I'm one of the innumerable supplicants at the time, so I get a little of their precious time.
So, I'm getting to do a lot more, and I do have some ideas. I'm not quite sure I want to tell you what they are before they happen, but yes, there's a range of them. It's so wonderful to be presented with new technological possibilities that let you rethink the way you do your job and open up new distas, but also that are collaborative because, of course, for writers and special critics, it's a pretty solitary endeavor, usually. So, it's nice to, I know this from his experience, it's nice to be able to collaborate and to feed off of somebody else's creativity and ideas.
And as far as giving the sad fact of being left alone to write, I have to say that everything I do, and that includes the sound piece, I want to be able to stand on its own as a writer that's important to me, that not have no life as just a written thing. And that means that much of, basically anything I do, I think, has to somehow be clearly expressed in words. What we do as critics is try to convey ideas and beliefs and be advocates and writers, good writers. There are a lot of them out there who are writing about architecture, thankfully.
And I think it's a feel-rich and rich and healthy conversation and amazing journalism. I know that's not the usual thing to say when it's complaining that there's not doing that stuff out there, but I think there's a lot of people who are doing really good work. They've still only got to need my advice. Well, I would like to pitch your next architecture multimedia piece as an engagement with monuments and any type of architectural landmark that isn't explicitly used for, say, a programmatic function, but for tourism and some type of overall cultural significance.
What I would love to read on experience is a multimedia engagement with architecture criticism of monuments. But by monuments, what do you mean, like the Lincoln Memorial or what are you talking about? Exactly. Like highly iconic, not specifically architecturally programmed spaces such as, you know, war memorials or populars or public figures or so.
Things that are often recreated in architectural media as just solely as images or, but also are strong tourism drivers so that people say the pantheon or such like that. Right. I mean, how one actually experiences them? Yeah.
Yeah. That's my point. I'll put that on the list. That's interesting.
I have a list and I will put it on it. I mean, monuments are interesting because, of course, you know, they're both very well-known and there's a lot of television and other stuff about their famous monuments, but they're not often talked about really in terms of public space or, you know, as architecture necessarily. You know, we said the part of the monument is, but pantheon is. But I assume you're talking about things like not Russian or whatever, things that are.
Precisely. What first came to mind was something like Mylan's Vietnam Memorial, which is something that, of course, many people are inundated with images of that, but there's really nothing that can compare with the visitation. And that's how it may, it might always have to be that way and that's fine. No, no, no, but I think that's where VR comes in too because, you know, it's going to open up and that's obviously on my agenda as well.
It opens up a whole new range of ways of experiencing space and Mylan, you know, if you know, Memorial is a very good example. It is something very hard to understand from photographs and even plans which not everybody can read, of course, doesn't convey the particular emotional and formal impact of it in the way that it does feel like moving through it. So regarding VR, this is maybe one final question. What do you think is the major offering that VR technology can give to both architecture critics and architects practicing architects?
You know, I'm going to slide that question because I haven't worked with VR yet and there's probably an intelligent way to answer that question which I can't do now. Okay, that's right. And what I would say would be pretty speculative. My guess is, would be like yours unless you've done it already.
I have, actually, but I don't have nearly as much experience as I think anyone should have. There's some really interesting research that goes along with what it means to be in VR environments for longer than, you know, a minute or however. Exactly, yeah. Well, Michael, thank you so much for being on Archonnex Sessions 1-1.
It was great to talk with you. My pleasure. Thanks so much for inviting me. Thanks for listening to our 1-2-1 interview with Michael Kimmelman.
Donnie LaVoynoff at its podcast and Matt Scaling has composed the music. Myself and Paul Bucharunia are the producers of 1-2-1. New episodes come out every Monday and to make sure you don't miss the latest 1-2-1 interview, subscribe to us on iTunes. To keep up with podcasting news in general from Archonnex, follow us on Twitter through at ArchSessions, that's at ARCH Sessions or hashtag Archonnex Sessions.
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