ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner, 2022 Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE Awards

A room’s acoustic character seems at once the most technical and the most mystical of concerns. Since the early Enlightenment, European architects have systematically endeavored to represent and control the propagation of sound in large interior spaces. Their work has been informed by the science of sound but has also been 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 L. Clarke reveals how architecture has impacted the ways we continue to listen to, talk about, and creatively manipulate sound in the physical environment.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Joseph L. Clarke is assistant professor of art history at the University of Toronto and a licensed architect. His scholarship explores how modern architecture has defined itself as a discipline through particular techniques, theories, and representational conventions.

REVIEWS

"Echo's Chambers is an important work of intellectual and architectural history that charts the history of the engagement of architects with the emerging science of acoustics from the Enlightenment to the mid-twentieth century. Joseph L. Clarke has grounded his work in four linguistic cultures, consulting an impressive range of rare source materials in French, Italian, and German. The result is a highly original book that will appeal to diverse audiences at the intersection of architecture, sound, and space." —Kathleen James-Chakraborty, University College Dublin

"In this outstanding work, Joseph L. Clarke has built a very nuanced history that will change the way we understand the cultural production of modern architecture. He offers us a history of acoustics not simply as a science of sound but as a social phenomenon in which audiences of performances and audiences of the built environment began to hear their world differently, and in turn were encountering spaces that taught them how to hear and see differently. Echo's Chambers shows how deeply intertwined sound and architecture have been and, therefore, makes a major contribution to both architectural history and sound studies as mutually inclusive fields of study.” —Niall Atkinson, author of The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life

“Clarke . . . makes the case for acoustics as an architectural component that is both mystical and scientific.” —Metropolis

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Translations

Introduction: “The Night Shall Be Filled with Music”

1. Domesticating Echo: Clamors in Print

2. Spaces Heard and Seen: Constructing Acoustic Naturalism

Color Plates

3. The Catacaoustic Imagination: Enchantment by Immersion

4. Redeeming the Senses: The Acoustics of Total Art

5. Listening Out of Place: Modern Architecture and acoustique électronique

Conclusion: On Further Reflection

Notes

Bibliography

Index

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.