Together with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, SONCITIES is co-presenting a workshop on Vibrational Architectures. This workshop, for students in architecture and art, is concerned with the possibilities for vibrational architectures--architectures that privilege vibrational phenomena, including audible and inaudible sound, seismic waves, and mechanical waves--to disrupt and reorient architectural thought.

Whereas architecture is typically imagined in relation to stable, fixed, static, and enduring forms and structures such as monumental buildings, vibrational architectures are unstable, unfixed, dynamic, open, and anarchic. Vibrational architectures generate anarchic spatialities: spatial forms and processes that cannot be contained, predicted, or planned. As such, they present fertile tools through which for thinking architecture and urbanism otherwise.

This workshop introduces concepts and theories of vibrational architecture through the work of such practitioners and theorists who work across sound, vibration, and architecture including Maryanne Amacher, Mark Bain, Nikola Bojić, Steve Goodman, Alvin Lucier, Brett Mommersteeg, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Mendi+Keith Obadike, Gascia Ouzounian, Jonathan Tyrrell, and Jan St. Werner, among others.

It offers participants the chance to experiment with a vibrational platform, Vibraceptional Plate (2024) by Jan St. Werner, commissioned by the SONCITIES research project and exhibited for the first time at the Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb, as part of the exhibition Vibraception - Investigations in Wavespace curated by Ana Škegro. This project evolves as both a vibrating structure and a platform for experimentation and inquiry into vibrational phenomena and perception: an platform that invites auditory and physical encounters with vibrating surfaces, forms, and spaces, and that engages with ideas of “wavespace” (St. Werner).

Vibraceptional Plate emerges out of Jan St. Werner’s years-long investigations into sound as a mode of spatial practice and the creation of anarchic architectures that deploy sound’s material and physical properties, as well as psychoacoustic processes, to challenge the fixity and stability of architectural forms and structures. 

The workshop will also include a design component, whereby participants will be invited to imagine and sketch vibrational architectures and share their designs with the group. Additionally, these design sketches will be shared on the website for the SONCITIES project (soncities.org) and considered for publication in a book, Handbook for Sonic Urbanism.

WORKSHOP CONVENERS

Jan St. Werner, Gascia Ouzounian, Brett Mommersteeg, Nikola Bojic, Ana Skegro

THANK YOU

Damir Gamulin, Ela Domitrovic, University of Zagreb Faculty of Architecture, MSU

Image credit: Jan St. Werner