Sunday, September 9, 2007

Sound and urbanism

The city became in the last few years subject of many architectural debates , from grafic explanations translated into numbers and figures to hipotesis of how the next urban enviroment will look what function and what scale will it have . The 21 century is clearly the century of the city as a lot of architecture events made tahat clear transforming the subjects related to cityes in big subjects with endeless speculations on the urban field and the city identity in a world dominated by the globalization phenomenon.
A lot of architects and people in general think about cityes as lanscapes of architecture , advetising social activities like shopping and cultural activities connected to the city scene . But sometimes is more than a mix of architecture and socila networks , a city is shaped by its visual scape and by the audio scape too by that I ean that a city contains a certain ammount of urban sounds that are caracteristical to every city in the world . The city sound has a grat importance in the way a person that moves around the urban web can percive the city , in some cases the necesity for urban sound bariers is obvious and in many cases sound can have strong contribution to our daily stress charge . I 'm talking about this because leaving appart the urban questions related to the way a city should look or be organised on a planing level , functionality , good infrastructure, purpose, grid , organic developement are important factors in an urbanistic discourse , but sometimes things have to shrink to a human proportion of seeing and expiriencing things that happen on an individula point of view , anyway everyone expirieces the urban in a different way , theories about the city and about how shouldexpand or function are purely geometric describing a city on a scale that is becoming graffic at one point . I think that sometimes we have to think in an orizontal way more than a tree dimensional way or in the way things are percived by the person that explores the urban .
This way of seeing a city makes you think about a new tipe of factors that influence movement attention and behaviour .
The factors are visual and auditive , from the tram that makes a sepecifica sound and contributes at the waking of of the city to the metro enclosed sound , the fast food sound from the knots where lunch break are happening . The city has a rithm of its own that is not generatde by architecture that is static but by movement and intercation of the people , Is it infrastructure not as important as architecture ? In a high rise building a major role is atributed to the elevator that becomes a money making machine makig connexions between people faster and making the possibility of goeing higher with a cointruction more plausible . Back to horizontality the infrastructurte of the city the speed of connexions and the simplicity of changing from one mean of public transportation to anauther is more and more important in a society that is pressured by the enviromental problems and by the necesity of finding alternative means of saving resouces .
Insormation has to flow in the city and the best way to make this possible is adverising and urban screens that can transmit information in a non static way as traditional advetising does .So the city is more of an expirience made out of lesurire places , economical hubs and public transport .
As a conlusion the city i first of all a multilaiered place that combines all kind of activities defining in this way the main features of that specific place . the layers are both socialy , spatialy and historicaly because a city can not really function without memory or history the common couciosness can not work without somekind of memory of the past and progress cant be seen in an enviroment that is constantly modern ( example the city of Brasil by Oscar Niemeyer) . the citizens have to have a colective memory in this direction , a memory that bounds the old and new and that makes the connexion between generations beeing in the same time common daily discution for anyone that is interested in history ) . Architecture has a strong importance too defining the stature of that city and making it have a strong stand . Interesting enough is the fact that I personally consider that city architecture is goeing trough a major change because of the fact that urban fachades are starting to mix with advertising and that is morfing the lanscape in an interesting way . facades are becoming more and more the same building structure as the facade and slovley but surely the shift from facades to advertising walls will happen .
The city is a cople expirience and for sure is more than architecture and urbanism it is sound , visual , weather people and feeling .

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