A Visual Imprint of Moving Air

摘要

Zurich-based architect and scholar Sabine von Fischer writes at the intersection of architecture and science. The essay reprinted here, on the experimental pursuit of architectural sound photography, first appeared in the. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (Vol. 76, No. 3, September 2017; pages 326-348; ©2017 by the Society of Architectural Historians; published by the University of California Press Journals). It won the 2018 Founders' Award, which the society gives annually for an article in the journal by an emerging scholar that exhibits excellence of scholarship and presentation. The recent turn toward studies of the environment as part of architectural history puts in question the discipline's emphasis on the visual and challenges us to include phenomena that are physical but not necessarily recognizable by the eye. Environmental histories expand the scale and media of subjects commonly thought of as "architectural." For example, architectural sound photography from the 1920s and 1930s is a remarkable and overlooked reference for the noise maps and climate registers circulated currently. In this article, i examine the photography of sound in architectural models, placing it at the intersection of the history of architecture, modern architectural acoustics, and media for visualizing physical phenomena. i will show how this photographic method links the sensory and the scientific in architectural reasoning. The models and apparatuses used to study the acoustics of spaces expose the material stakes involved in simulating architecture. While mathematical calculations of architectural acoustics, such as the reverberation formula, are still in use, visual representations of sound created with photography were soon declared obsolete. Today, the study of photography of sound propagation from the archives allows us to understand the role of the senses both in the conception and perception of scientific experiments and in architectural reasoning.