AVAILABLE NOW
Echo’s Chambers:
Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space
“A breath of fresh air. . . . A fundamental turn in the literature on the subject.”
—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
Winner, 2022 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Awards
A room’s acoustic character seems both the most technical and the most mystical of concerns. Since the early Enlightenment, European architects have endeavored to represent and control the propagation of sound in large interior spaces. Their work has been informed by the science of sound but also entangled with debates on style, visualization techniques, performance practices, and the expansion of the listening public. Echo’s Chambers explores how architectural experimentation from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for concepts of acoustic space that are widely embraced in contemporary culture. It focuses on the role of echo and reverberation in the architecture of Pierre Patte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Carl Ferdinand Langhans, and Le Corbusier, as well as the influential acoustic ideas of Athanasius Kircher, Richard Wagner, and Marshall McLuhan. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of media and auditory culture, Joseph Clarke reveals how architecture has impacted the ways we continue to listen to, talk about, and creatively manipulate sound in the physical environment.
More Praise for Echo’s Chambers
One of “13 Architecture and Design Books to Add to Your Reading List.”
—Metropolis
“[An] extraordinarily rich history of architecture and acoustic space. . . . Essential.”
—Choice
“A major contribution to both architectural history and sound studies as mutually inclusive fields of study.”
—Niall Atkinson, author of The Noisy Renaissance
“An important work of intellectual and architectural history. . . . A highly original book.”
—Kathleen James-Chakraborty, author of German Architecture for a Mass Audience
“An excellent teaching resource. . . . Echo’s Chambers will become an influential reference work in the history of architecture and the adjacent fields of STS, sound studies, and the history of technology.”
—Technology and Culture
More on Architectural Acoustics
The Art and Science of Making Buildings Sound Natural
• What is “acoustic naturalism” and why are we in thrall to it?
“That Great Brouhaha”: Picturing Sound in Nineteenth-Century France
• Impressionist painting and new ways of listening in the age of industry
The Electronic Campanile at Ronchamp
• Le Corbusier’s little-known proposal for an electrified “bell tower” at his Ronchamp chapel
Echoes of Byzantium: Review of Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia
• On contemporary efforts to measure and simulate the acoustics of historic buildings
Acoustic Modernity
• Introduction to a guest-edited volume of the academic journal Grey Room
Catacoustic Enchantment: The Romantic Conception of Reverberation
• How early 19th-century Germans used reverberation as an architectural effect
Iannis Xenakis and the Philips Pavilion
• The young composer who helped Le Corbusier design an innovative multimedia pavilion
“Impressionist cityscapes drew on an idea of the street as a multisensory spectacle.”
—“That Great Brouhaha”
My guest-edited volume of the academic journal Grey Room