J O S H   C U L L E R T O N 

In discussing architectural design and the process in producing a defined concept which can impose atmospheric qualities to an intended audience, silence as a device is often unnoticed. The tendency is often to focus on the material conditions of the concept and not how silence can act as material condition, interpreted as a tool in which users can interact but more so as psychological narrative to generate thought. Projects discussed in pervious lectures such as Peter Eisenman’s, Memorial to the Jews of Europe establishes silent thought through a distancing of temporary detachment.1 The disoriented space stimulates self-awareness in search for a familiar voice yet stillness only presents itself due to the density of the structure around. The psychological narrative of this stillness makes you aware of your own presence producing moments of thought whereby the architecture becomes clear.

 

Nevertheless where an architecture that strives to evoke complete silence as a material condition is unreasonable as composer John Cage discusses: “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot”2

We see that there can be no silence without noise and that concept of silence can be seen not as a noise but as a thought. In mediation, one appears to be in a moment of thought in silence yet it is state of understanding; awareness of your own body, detaching yourself from the place you are in. That place however has to echo that understanding of silence in a material context and not try to envision an intangible place of silence. Eisenman has designed an intellectual connectively to stillness through this understanding of materiality as the concrete blocks generate a quietness that a memorial should have but also producing detachment in a busy part of Berlin.