That’s Michaelangelo’s David over there on the right. The Motherland Calls is not screwing around, though.
Tag: sculpture
Legible soundscapes
The New York Times reports on the controversies of the Shot Spotter gunshot locator. The device is a fascinating piece of technology that, in the words of James C. Scott, makes the soundscape “legible.”
In his book, The Tuning of the World, R. Murray Schaefer coined the term “soundscape” to describe the specific ambient conditions of a location. Like a landscape, soundscapes are an aspect of environment that remains relatively constant and which humans adapt to, interpret, and reshape. Schaefer interprets ambient noise as a part of the built environment. Take, for example, the way church bells were used to communicate time and call people to attention. The need to hear became a factor in medieval densification and growth required parishes to bud rather than sprawl. The information they conveyed was too important to do without. But, as we’ve needed bells less, they have shifted from signals into soundscape.
But, perhaps the newest tendency is not to tune ambient noise out, but to process it. Typically, this has been in the name of art, a way of humanizing it through aesthetic effects. Sometimes with simple analog acoustics, such as Lancaster’s Singing Ringing Tree, and other times through algorithms in Yokohama’s Tower of Winds. Both are interesting artworks, but they become still more interesting when seen as containing design choices in the form of the parameters that the artworks transform. The Tree might be more indiscriminate, but it’s aestheticization of wind is very transparent. The wind blows, you hear the howl and the tone at the same time, and one is explicitly the cause of the other.
The Tower of Winds, on the other hand, is controlled through algorithms that process the winds and noise it visualizes. It’s computerized and opaque, and you’d have to see the code to understand the process. I think it’s more beautiful, but it is also bound to the instruments that translate phenomena into machine-readable signals that are then interpreted by a program of more-or-less arbitrary signals. The process of getting from input to light relies, quite literally, on a black box. It is opaque.
So too is the ShotSpotter. It has assigned value to a particular range of frequency and timbre and understood them as probable gunshots. Software locates the source of the sound through trilateration and presents a monitor with a sound clip and a probable location cross-referenced to a GIS model. Further layers or readily processable information are included, hypothetically improving response time.
But, when legibility is so explicit, it also becomes possible to evade the mechanisms of gunfire by evading the identified sound of gunfire. An individual doesn’t have to suppress the sound, just distort it to the point that does not fit the parameters for a “gunshot.” At this point the precision of the system starts to fall apart – and it is the precision that gives police departments a time advantage over human call-in.
All this to say that how you pick parameters matters as much as how you manipulate their content. It’s hard to get criminals to agree to standards.
Mixing New and Old at the Eisenhower Memorial
Yesterday, a panel selected a design concept by Frank Gehry for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial The design is promising.
The large blocks form a circle, enclosing a single tree and a small pool of water. On the faces of the ring of stones, images cast in low relief and quotations in large type speak history to those inside. East and west of the central courtyard, groves of trees canopy informal plazas. At first blush, these spaces feel intimate and beautiful. Rising from just beyond the trees, large stainless steel screens supported by limestone columns enclose the space on the north and south sides. The screens will contain some of the sculptural program through a woven scrim that hides the forgettable Department of Education Building to the south. The street condition is undefined, bounded by the scrims except at three prominent areas.
The axis of Maryland Avenue cuts through the memorial, with the stone ring in the center. Building the memorial without disrupting the viewshed of the Capitol or traffic flow were seen as the two big problems. The Memorial Commission selected a design by Gehry that sidesteps the issue of sightlines, by removing one of eight columns and two sections of the screens. This way, the design frames the primary view of the Capitol with the same structures that fit it into the grid. In terms of the vehicular route, the panel rejected a vehicular road through the monument and instead created a pedestrian plaza. The site was located to move the monumental program off of the Mall. Drawing visitors, most of whom tour on foot, was equally important.
Gehry has tamed his own style is tamed for this project, although the ring of stones exemplifies the blockish forms he had been experimenting with since the opening of Walt Disney Hall. Mercifully, Gehry has also eschewed the dismal expressionism of a younger generation of memorial designers. The design team did not try to assign tremendous meaning to every little detail. Instead, it is a building that can be judged for its power and for its beauty, although people will disagree.
Continue reading ➞ Mixing New and Old at the Eisenhower Memorial
Forest Glen Seminary: Into the Woods
Part one of a four-part essay exploring context, typology, and interpretation. Comments encouraged.
Hidden among a leafy scattering of houses and trees, Forest Glen Seminary is a jumble of vernacular buildings unlike any of the temples of boxes that define Washington. Its buildings, both magnificent and ludicrous amount to a dignified campiness that defies expectations to be one of the most profoundly interesting places encircled by the Beltway. Once constituting a women’s college when that meant a two-year Mrs. degree, the buildings are once again becoming domestic space, the more private areas cut into condos and the core of the complex, rental units. Scattered around the area, turn-of-the-century houses are being renovated and new housing by the urbanist developer EYA has just been finished. Through the site’s history, radical changes have shaped its form, but none so radical as the current shift in context.