GREG BAKER

RECOMBINANT NARRATIVE - PROGRAM

THIS THESIS PROJECT EXPLORES NOISE AS A BYPRODUCT OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM WITHIN A LARGER FRAMEWORK OF SOUND AS (SPATIAL) TERRITORY, BOTH PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. 1. TEMPORARY INSTALLATION (WINDSHAPE, LACOSTE FRANCE 2006) Atop a castle once occupied by the Marquis de Sade in the eighteenth century, a temporary space for exhibitions and performances was constructed in five weeks using tiered tripods. The tripods consisted of three plastic tubes, joined by strips of aluminum, and were outfitted with polypropylene cords woven together in situ. These thin materials create an elastic structure, using curved tubes and taut cords to form a flexible shell that moves with the oscillations of the wind. Once the tripods were placed on top of each other to create a second level, additional cords were woven together and strung between the tripods. The installation was illuminated at night, and could be seen from up to three miles away. Alterations in the tension of the cords caused the establishment of different rhythmic vibrations as well as overall forms. 2. INTERACTION DESIGN (LOWREZ HIFI, WASHINGTON DC 2007) This project, designed to renovate the foyer of an office building, is made of glass diplay cases with an LED matrix and a grid of posts that respond to touch. Each element follows the movement of passersby to program sound and light in real time. The LEDs act as pixels to form a larger image, sometimes text and other times low-resolution images. Cameras display barely recognizable shadows of people who traverse the lobby. The grid of metal posts play melodic sequences when touched. It is an example of an urban musical instrument, interactive yet also performative with no direct input. People are thus allowed the option to reconsider their relationship with urban space, a shift from spectator to participant. The plan challenges typical forms of representation, notating in plan and section different matrices that relate to sounds. 3. ACOUSTIC SCULPTURE (WAVE ORGAN, SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA 1986) This wave-activated environmental instrument is designed to cause the resonance of various pipes to be activated by pressure from incoming waves to make sound. Best heard at high tide, the sounds are very subtle. This causes a heightened awareness of the surrounding environment, bringing naturally generated tones into the mix of sounds heard in the city. The twenty-five organ pipes are made of PVC and concrete, and construction was overseen by a master stone mason. The jetty itself was constructed with material taken from a demolished cemetary, providing an assortment of granite and marble. It was built to merge in to the bay so that seawater would rush in, activating the lower ends of the pipes to create rumblings and wheezings uncommon in traditional musical notations and instrumentations. 4. VENUE (WESTERN CONCERT HALL TYPOLOGY) By studying the typology of concert halls, I hope to challenge notions of acoustics and privacy. Performace is not only what musicians express intentionally; it is also the shift in attention of an audience to the aural (and visual) subtleties related to a particular environment. Performers and audience alike begin to concentrate on the interaction of the music with the surrounding context. The privacy of the concert hall is a historical trend that fits less and less with the way performers desire to engage with the urban setting, yet its form remains effective at transmitting sound from a source to a large number of receivers. It is thus useful as an object of study to link the future of performance spaces to the lessons learned from the past.

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RECOMBINANT NARRATIVE - PROGRAM

READING RESPONSE The first lesson in architectural acoustics is not to live in the apartment directly below a musician, woodworker, or other noisy type of tenant. When considering program in the world of transondent architecture, it is critical that sound be understood as a sphere of influence. Rarely does a sound only reach its intended receiver, although this is somewhat improved with the use of headphones or with the complete enclosure of source and receiver. According to Charles Salter, acoustical requirements are considered according to the four factors of room shape, space allowances, space adjacencies, and materials (Salter, Charles M. Acoustics. William Stout San Francisco 1998 p. 70-1). Programmatic adjacencies such as the first lesson mentioned above are commonly dealt with by altering material use and construction technique in order to reduce transmission into the enclosure from where the complaint is coming. If the victims are decentralized, action is then directed toward the source; this is the commonality among many ordinances related to noise control. If the source affects disparate receivers, limitations and regulations are enacted against the unnecessary excitation, or triggering, of the source sound. The second lesson in acoustics is that a sound travelling through a given medium will be deadened by in increase in the amount of medium. This means that a porous ceramic tile will be more effective at deadening airborne sound transmission than a solid tile. It also means that leaving more of an air gap in a wall assembly, typically associated with its insulation effect against heat exchange, is effective sound insulation as well. The inverse of this lesson would prove useful in creating a network of orchestrated sounds in a city: the use of pipes and ultrasonic beams of sound allow sources to be transmitted over long distances even in a noisy urban setting.

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RECOMBINANT NARRATIVE - PROGRAM

1. TEMPORARY INSTALLATION (WINDSHAPE, LACOSTE FRANCE 2006)

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RECOMBINANT NARRATIVE - PROGRAM

2. INTERACTION DESIGN (LOWREZ HIFI, WASHINGTON DC 2007)

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RECOMBINANT NARRATIVE - PROGRAM

3. ACOUSTIC SCULPTURE (WAVE ORGAN, SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA 1986)

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RECOMBINANT NARRATIVE - PROGRAM

4. VENUE (WESTERN CONCERT HALL TYPOLOGY)