Dub Housing: Joel Sanders's Architecture of Surveillance

Architect Joel Sanders presented his Mix House project at Postopolis (video if you scroll down here), having been invited following this enticing post from Bldg Blog a few weeks ago (Click here first for pictures and additional information.) The Mix House is not just another modernist contortion, but a dwelling as three-channel audio device. Outfitted with architectural features and parabolic microphones oriented to capture sounds from the street, the backyard, and the sky, it gives the homeowner the ability both to listen in on the soundscape surrounding him, and to mix and record the three inputs into a musical composition from a command station in the kitchen. It's a contemporary twist on what Brian Eno in the 1970s described as his "efforts to produce original pieces ... for particular situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres."€ Here the compositions are not composed for specific spaces, however, but by specific places at particular times. These recordings might then be broadcast as audio perfume throughout the neighborhood, or saved and replayed to color the house's interior like a shade of paint, or furnish it like a 21st-century remix of Erik Satie's Musique d'ameublement.

Sanders explained that the Mix House is the first project he has developed to deal explicitly with the sonic possibilities of architecture. It's an inspiring thought experiment, since it provides a fresh reconfiguring of the ordinarily visual and tactile preoccupations that determine so much of what we experience in our built environments. As Sanders pointed out, citing historical work by Emily Thompson, except for concert hall architecture "we're typically indifferent to acoustics, unless something is wrong."€ The goal of sound design is often to craft space in ways that prevent us from even noticing its sonic character. Though often outfitted with a/v systems these days, it is still unusual that a piece of architecture could be constructed specifically to emphasize and utilize these characteristics. As Bldg Blog points out, the Mix House is a live-in musical instrument, offering its inhabitants an array of opportunities to create art from the ambient environment, and to customize the sound of their own space.

Such an innovative, interactive design is fascinating, but several conceptually unsettling leitmotifs also emerged over the course of Sanders's presentation. Tellingly, the architect placed his project in the context of both the early warning listening systems that England began constructing prior to World War II, and modernism's iconic floor-to-ceiling glass window, which offered the owner the unimpeded ability to monitor and blend into the landscape surrounding him. In this sense the Mix House is also a tool of surveillance, a topic Sanders has also explored in projects like his House for a Bachelor. Here, he sank the front lawn below ground level to give the owner the ability to remain unseen in the dwelling's core while simultaneously experiencing the environment around him. He can walk into the external environment, yet he is simultaneously protected and detached from it. The Mix House incorporates a similar visual sense of what Sanders characterized as "vulnerability,"€ but gives it a sonic turn.

Sound theorist Douglas Kahn is among those who have found a critical importance in the difference between vision and sound. In Noise, Water, Meat, his study of sound in the arts, he observes,

Although light traverses the space between an object and observer just as readily as sound does between an action and listener, the reflection of light is understood not as an action comparable to one that might create a sound but, because of a constancy of action, as the result of a state ... Terrestrially, sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences...

Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality.

For Kahn, whereas vision is an act of one body perceiving another discrete body in a subjective relationship, hearing is an act of mingling between bodies. Italian Futurist painters like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla sensed this possibility in paintings like The Street Enters the House and Speeding Automobile representing the turbulence of modern life as an amorphous interweaving and interpenetration of lines of force. Musician and critic David Toop also heard this in his landmark book Ocean of Sound when he described ambient music as an art of "openness,"€ in which the composer recognizes the importance of the sonic dimensions of life and the connections that tie its various elements together. The ambient attitude is not only an aesthetic choice but a political act. Whereas the eye has been conceived in modernity as a tool of subjective perception and interpretation of a world that is "out there,"€ the ear is omnidirectional, permeable, and impressionable, surrendering to the influence of the wider world, while seeking to incorporate it into one's own being. If the eye is an organ of division, the ear is one of community. "There are ear plugs,"€ Toop writes, "but then I just hear the sound of my own shell."

The Mix House's openness, as a machine for listening, is a profoundly wary one, however. One might argue (and Sanders indicated that others have suggested when reviewing his project) that the house could very well achieve the same goal merely by opening conventional windows. However, by adding extra steps of mediation in the form of overengineered prosthetic ears, the architect is exploring a queasy tension between private and public spaces. The Mix House incorporates sounds of the neighborhood within itself, but only if the windows can be shut tight and the sounds can be personalized through manipulation. The inhabitant wants a connection to public space, but interacts with it at arm's length, and only insofar as he can get what he needs from it as wallpaper for his cocoon.

Seen in this light, Sanders's constructions might be providing apt metaphors for certain facets of the way we live now. At the same time that the Mix House offers new artistic opportunities, it achieves them at the expense of the owner's participation in a public space. It is a suitable solution for an age when social interactions and politics are no longer practiced in the streets but on the Web, when friendships happen via corporate-backed networking sites, or when sprawling, gated suburban communities are planned in ways that minimize interaction between families. This is suburban architecture for the age of terror, the age of illegal wiretaps, the age of Megan's Law, when any neighbor could be a threat, or where everyone has something to hide.

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