“This is desert country, weird country, cult country, like all deserts, with its shrill noons, and a shimmering silence. Dust devils spook past students’ tents. Stones creak together under your footsteps. Lizards flash through the mesquite and cactus.”
Preface
In the preface to Modern Architecture, E. Baldwin Smith writes that prefaces, “like all introductions, are usually unnecessary, but courteous formalities. They are too often a transition between nothing that has gone before and something worthwhile that is to follow.” This project does not necessarily need an introduction, but I think one would be helpful.
This three-part podcast explores the intersection between acoustic ecology and the built environment, specifically the Phoenix metropolitan area known as the Valley of the Sun, located in the unique ecosystem of the Sonoran Desert. I wanted to bring attention to the audible aspects of the environment and how they connect to Frank Lloyd Wright’s ideas of democratic architecture. The Sonoran Desert is considered the most biodiverse desert in the world, home to approximately 60 different species of mammal, 350 species of bird, and 100 species of reptile, and spanning three nations: Mexico, the United States, and the Tohono O’odham Nation.
Hildegard Westerkamp, an early, prolific soundwalker, writes that our “ears have been neglected for a long time,” and as a result, our sonic environment has suffered, and I argue that our quality of life has suffered along with it. However, the call to attend to the sonic environment is not necessarily a call to silence.
In August 2022, The Atlantic published an essay by Xochitl Gonzalez titled “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?”. It partly recounts the author’s experience moving from her loud and proud New York neighborhood to attend an Ivy League university with a prized atmosphere of silence. She makes many excellent points about the relationships between city noise and race, class, and immigration status. Gonzalez makes a compelling case in defense of the right to be loud, and I don’t disagree with her. Research suggests that areas with high minority or low socioeconomic status residents are louder than wealthier or majority-white areas. However, I want to take a look at the larger implications of the noise that surrounds us in our daily lives. Sometimes, I am so used to noise that I mistake it for silence. I will be in my apartment on a hot summer evening, and hardly realize the sound of the air conditioning, having become so ubiquitous. For the same reason, some workplaces have taken to playing “pink noise” in the background to lessen the disturbance of coughs, phones, and conversations across the office. Phoenix seems to be an eternally growing city, and with that growth comes more cars and more concrete. With more cars comes more noise, and with more concrete, comes the heat island effect. Sound is bound up with human activity on an individual and collective level.
Frank Lloyd Wright emphasized democracy in his architecture, and he had a complicated relationship with the city, condemning how he felt it interfered with individual freedom. High-density living allowed landlords to hold high concentrations of rental properties, and therefore power. One of his most iconic concepts, the corner window, was intended as a statement to “break the box” of typical architecture and offer a new perspective, literally, on the world. He lamented that even though the concept of the corner window spread, its antifascist philosophy didn’t.
Wright didn’t have a particularly special approach to or outlook on acoustics, but I believe his ecological approach illuminates how contemporary life fights against the natural environment. Wright approached design with intention and purpose, and if we built cities with more intention about the sonic environment, could we design more democratic cities?
All Episodes
Episode I: Listen
In the first episode, I bring attention to the details of sound and the significance they have in addition to Wright’s intentional design approach of organic architecture. In the soundwalk through Taliesin West, we listen to Wright’s office, the drafting room, the garden room, the pavilion, and the cabaret.
Episode II: Noise/Pollution
Moving outside the walls of Taliesin West, I focus on the idea of noise pollution and the great irony of Frank Lloyd Wright’s love for cars. Cars were actually a very important fixture in his decentralized vision of the future where he imagined an early version of interstates. Phoenix is one of the national leaders in fatal car crashes and home to many Waymo driverless cars. In this episode, we listen to the sounds of some of the city’s high-risk crash intersections and the traffic audible outside Taliesin West in the quiet area among shelters built by Taliesin students.
Episode III: Accidental Environmentalist
The final episode turns from the cars to the roads. I highlight the intense effect of the urban heat island effect on Phoenix and how it disproportionately affects poor neighborhoods. How could the principles of organic architecture lead to more sustainable and equitable designs for residents? We listen to some of these neighborhoods in contrast to some of the wealthier, greener, more remote, natural areas of the city–including golf courses. Building on the previous episodes, it investigates how cities could be built democratically.
NOTE: Throughout the episodes, AI was used to narrate some of the content. The voices used are from Speechify Studio.
Photos
After the rain, outside a student shelter
Garden bed at night
Outside the garden room
Crepe myrtles on the property
Hallway in the cabaret
Garden room
Outside a student shelter
A student shelter
Bees enjoying the flowers
Sunset at Taliesin West
Intersection at N 67th Ave and McDowell Rd
overtones
What makes sound?
Here, sound is represented as frequency (measured in Hz) over time. The darker lines represent stronger frequencies, and the lighter ones represent quieter frequencies. The frequencies happening on top of the main note are referred to as overtones. Different overtones are what make the sound of a piano different from a violin, even when they play the same note.
The examples below show an analysis of the outdoors of Taliesin West. On the left is the unedited recording. The overtones are much more disorganized, spanning well outside the audible range of human hearing. The presence of all these quieter frequencies indicates a “noisy-ness” to the sound. On the right, I demonstrate the sound of this “noise” component by deleting various frequencies from the recording.
Urban Growth
Even in the short time between 2014 and 2022, as shown in the video to the left, there is noticeable urban growth in the Surprise, Queen Creek, and Avondale areas.