CYMATIC SOUNDSCAPES

ARCHITECTURE
Architecture is music frozen. An exploration into formalizing sound; our syntax allows us to express sound and music architecturally. By manipulating frequency, volume, time, and space in sound we can conceptually and formally create a new architecture from the landscape. Our architecture interacts with the landscape and is formed by the landscape. Architecture as a discipline has been based on visual thinking. This project allows us to think about architecture audibly. To orchestrate space as it was music. As a species sound has a greater impact to move us emotionally and we have evolved to think visually and feel audibly.

MARS
The moment we lose the ability to be moved by non-human expressivity we lose some thing, and if we are artists we lose more. It means we are becoming obsessed with the human world and the human imagination. We thought that injecting the human imagination onto mars would be a mistake. Our project explores the capacity of the non-human expressivity of sounds interaction with the Martian landscape. Our architecture is as unique as the Martian landscape. The architecture is not to be understood as architecture on Earth. We are designing the landscape to create habitable architecture rather than projecting our own constructions onto the landscape. Martian areography and atmospheric conditions affect sound in a drastically different way from Earths geography and atmosphere. This made simulating our construction almost impossible and also allowed amazingly foreign spatial relationships in our architecture. Matter expresses itself in many ways, from the simple emission of physical information to the deliberate use of melody and rhythm. The universe itself may be viewed as a grand symphony of material expressivity. The early human artists who tapped into this expressive reservoir for their cave paintings, body tattoos, and ritual ceremonies, far from introducing artistry into the world were simply adding one more voice to an ongoing material chorus.

CONSTRUCTION
Our architecture is built from cymatic vibrations. By injecting sound into the Martian landscape in three dimensions we can create redesign the landscape and play represent our architecture sonically. The construction of our project would be similar to a controlled earth quake. However, we have amazing control over the sound and can simulate the spaces that would be creating by vibrating the soil at different volumes, pitches, and with different timing.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | School of Architecture

AD 1 | Instructor: Ezio Blasetti