Illustration of Nathalie Harb’s Silent Room V.04 by Alexander Tszortzis de Paz and Nathalie Harb.

Workshop: Sonic Refuge: Designing Sonic Architectures

Conveners: Nathalie Harb, Gerard Gormley, Gascia Ouzounian

For: Architects, urban designs, sound artists; students currently enrolled in sound, architecture, or urban design / urban planning / urban studies programmes

When/where: 2-5 PM, LJ Works, 5 Gastineau Yard, Loughborough Junction, SW9 7FA

To register: Please send an informal email to gascia@gmail.com describing your interests/background in sound, architecture, or urban design/urban planning.

This workshop will explore approaches to designing sonic architectures. We will encounter a range of works that span sound art, architecture, and urban design; we will also listen collectively to sounds that signal home and belonging, or, alternatively, displacement, conflict, and exclusion. Participants will then be invited to create sketches for installations, architectures, and spatial designs that respond to the theme of sonic refuge. We will discuss these designs, which will be featured in a London Festival of Architecture walk-through event at LJ Works in Loughborough Junction on Saturday 15 June, and on the website soncities.org. 

The workshop is offered on the occasion of the launch of Silent Room V.04. Commissioned by SONCITIES and hosted by Meanwhile Space, Silent Room V.04 is a sonic architecture by Nathalie Harb, part of a series of urban typologies that reimagine the city through listening. Its tent-like structure evokes a refuge, claiming the city as a place of belonging and rest. Responding to the Loughborough Junction railway station site, it is a meditation on migration and movement. A soundtrack by Gerard Gormley transplants other sounds into the site, acting as a sonic crossroads. Silent Room is a call to attune to the city of the future as a dwelling-place centred around human well-being.

Nathalie Harb is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based between Paris and Beirut. She creates public interventions, installations, and set designs that question the notions of home, shelter and agency by proposing an alternative use of our daily habitat. Forming Nathalie Harb Studio in 2017, she envisions it as a collaborative space where diverse practitioners, musicians, acoustic consultants, permaculture experts, environmental advisors, and architects, among others, converge to shape projects spanning urban interventions, community workshops, and exhibitions. The studio’s projects have been supported by such organisations and initiatives as UNESCO’s Week of Sound, the American University Beirut’s Neighborhood Initiative, the London Design Biennale, the British Council, and the European Research Council.

Gerard Gormley is an Irish sound artist whose work explores the actual and latent sonic potentials of spaces, buildings, and sites. His work evolves through various experimental processes that explore sound in relation to space and architecture. This might be an iterative process of recording sounds and vibrations at a site and playing them back into that site, such that the site becomes a carrier of sound and music that was created from it; or transplanting sounds from one place to another, bringing various places and their sonic and material histories into dialogue. Much of his work is granular and hyper-detailed, taking place at the level of microsonic and micro-textural investigation. It has been shown at daadgalerie, After (Berlin), The MAC Belfast, Modern Art Oxford, Cannes Festival, Storung Festival (Spain), The Cube at Virginia Tech, and broadcast nationally on cinema and television in Ireland and the UK.

Gascia Ouzounian is a sonic theorist and practitioner whose work explores sound in relation to space, architecture, urbanism, and violence. She is associate professor of music at the University of Oxford, where she leads the project Sonorous Cities: Towards as Sonic Urbanism (soncities.org).

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This workshop is part of a series of events, Quiet Urgency: Disturbing Sonic Ecologies, co-organised by Gascia Ouzounian, John Bingham-Hall and Diana Ibáñez López, and co-presented by MA Cities at Central Saint Martins and the SONCITIES research programme at the University of Oxford, 5-30 June 2024.