“Hearing structures and articulates the experience and understanding of space”. (Juhani Pallasmaa – The Eyes of the Skin.)
“Interiors are like large instruments, collecting sound, amplifying it, transmitting it elsewhere”. (Peter Zumthor – Atmospheres.)
First, we build silence. Then, we design how the architecture sounds.
Hearing is the first sense we develop in the uterus. It gives us information that covers from reasoning, knowledge, perception, memory to affections and emotions. Sound is perceived, not seen or touched. Matter allows is existence, travelling through it. Sound is not matter. Architecture is a medium for the propagation of sound.
In times of a cult towards image, the ephemeral, the shape for the sake of the shape, overstimulation in the media and social networks, its atypical to conceive architecture from the sound: ¿How does a building sound? ¿How do construction materials sound? ¿How does the constructed form influence in sonority? ¿How do the acoustics of space affect hearing?
A recording studio can be acknowledged as a set of technological devices that record sound with enough fidelity to modify it and use it as raw material for audio creations (music, cinema, publicity, television).
From this set of technological devices (microphones, consoles, compressors, cables, computers), architecture is also one of them. It’s not only a space container, but an active component in recording sound.
Manuals on how to build recording studios give us first world recipes, where the pieces can be found in “Audio Walmart” type stores. Without easy access to these standardized materials and technologies, we draw upon the knowledge of the properties of every piece and work on their physical response. We build acoustically calculated forms and proportions, benefiting from the common and economic materials.
Design and construction begins with the “box in a box” concept. A box within another box, where each is independent from the other.
The first box is the preexisting construction, making the most of the spaces and materials; existing walls, their thickness and mass, reusing demolition materials and giving them new function.
The second box is the sum of: floating floors, walls with “acoustic shapes and textures” and a wooden ceiling. Between both boxes, sound is dissipated and absorbed.
Irregularity in the planes that configure the spaces allows the sound waves to travel free through the architecture.
Wood, material that was once life, possesses the mystical property to absorb sound, keep it in its molecules and load itself with creative energy. This energy concentrated in the space is shared and reabsorbed.
We accomplished spaces with an ideal reverberation, which can be controlled, but not generated without the specific architecture.
An old house with a backyard in downtown Asunción transformed into a studio / shelter, so the artist can mentally relocate to a place of exclusive peace and creative freedom.
