After the exercise had been completed, I got into conversation with another Gallaudet student majoring in business, a lightly goateed and heavily tattooed young man named Michael. He said he’d been partnered with several community members inside a church. “What they wanted me to snap,” he said, “were objects that reflected the values of their community, but with no attention for the objects themselves. So they’d say, ‘Flowers are important to my community’—and then they’d guide me anywhere where the flowers were in the frame. I’d encourage them to take the picture from different angles—bird’s-eye view, from the right, the left, up, down, back and forth. I wanted to get them to take it from different perspectives—to see what it was and how it fit in with everything else in the church.”
Michael’s experience revealed the way that the community members were letting words and concepts blind them to the actual world they were standing in. The idea of “flowers” hid the blossoms themselves. The unassuming young man, because of his knowledge of silence, was able to show the hearing world how to see.
But how might this expanded perspective play out in architecture? Were there tangible gains a hearing person might receive from the Deaf knowledge of silence and space?
COLLECTIVE VISION
Robert Sirvage is a Deaf graduate student in architecture who has helped Bauman formulate some of the central tenets of Deaf Space. Sirvage has an auburn beard, sideburns razored close to his sharp cheekbones, and eyes that gleam with a striking pale-blue light.
He is writing his dissertation on proxemics—the study of how people move through space. When two Deaf people are walking together while signing, a complex choreography unfolds in which the person not actively signing is also watching over the other’s steps to protect them from falling or colliding with something. This has implications for how close together two Deaf people will walk. Sirvage referred to the process of Deaf people walking together as a “package agreement.” Bauman’s brother Dirksen, who teaches Deaf studies at Gallaudet, described the emphasis in Deaf culture on engagement with others. He maintains that among the hearing, the ability to hear oneself speak is crucial to how we maintain our sense of being present in the world. But this kind of “auto-stimulation” is unavailable to the Deaf. Instead, he maintains, what the Deaf have is “the face of the other as you sign.” This fact of always being held in the visual embrace of another person, he believes, creates the basis for a collectivist culture.
Sirvage has spent a great deal of time videoing the movement of Deaf and hearing people through the same space. When I watched some of these videos, I saw what he was talking about—it’s as though an invisible tether links the steps of Deaf people in conversation, in a manner that simply has no equivalent in the motion of the hearing. Hansel Bauman believes there’s an architectural corollary to this—space that helps people remain in each other’s visual embrace.
I got a sense of how this might work when Sirvage took me on a tour of the campus. He wanted to show me two places, he said. One that students shunned, but which had been built as a gathering point, and another which they themselves had made their main gathering point.
The first place he took me was in front of one of the central campus buildings. He asked me to sit down on one of two facing benches. There were high brick walls at my back juxtaposed at different angles, and various shrubs configured around the seating areas. Sirvage watched me carefully, and broke into a laugh when I found myself irresistibly drawn to turn around—several times in the course of a few minutes. Then he pointed out how, because of the juxtaposition of wall lines and plantings, there was no way anyone sitting on one of the benches could see another person approaching. Every arrival was a surprise, and—especially in the absence of auditory signals—this made for an uncomfortable sense of vulnerability. Even with the ability to hear, I felt jittery because the space left me without a visual tether to the larger world.
Sirvage smiled when I said this and noted that in the Canadian state of Ottawa, where he is originally from, there is a museum built without a single straight line or hard corner. It was all curves he said, because the Native Americans believed that devils lurk in corners. (Zen gardens also incorporate the idea that demons can only travel in straight lines.) Another touchstone for Deaf Architecture is a notion developed by the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. Köhler invented two nonsense words, “maluma” and “takete,” to illustrate the spatial associations we bring to different sounds. While maluma evokes images of soft, curvilinear, maternal forms, takete conjures sharp, angular shapes. Surveys indicate that the Deaf overwhelmingly opt for design elements reflecting maluma-type patterns. Sirvage mentioned to me that there is no sign for a square shape.
The second location Sirvage took me to was an expanse of cement at the entrance to a dorm. The building itself was an unimpressive, drab, modern space. I gave Sirvage a questioning look and asked whether this was really the hot spot he’d meant to show me. He gave a mischievous grin. I turned back to the vista before me and when I made myself sink into the place for a few minutes, I did feel something calming. I became conscious that I was looking over an unusually open view—the exact opposite of the previous location. But Sirvage showed me something further, which had not factored into my conscious impressions. By a fortuitous alignment of buildings, landscaping, and roads, the peripheral sight lines where I was standing were as spacious and open as the center of the visual field. “To me,” Sirvage said, “this place embodies ideas of silence, the peace we associate with quiet.”
In fact, research has established that the Deaf have greater peripheral vision than the hearing. An architecture that embodies Deaf awareness of a wider peripheral field might help to conjure the mental state we yearn for in silence.
There’s another possibility as well, one involving meta physical sight lines. Sirvage told me how important the idea of showing the history of a building’s use was to Deaf Space. “A scuffed floor communicates to us,” he said, “because of what it says about how people interact with a space.” Deaf people don’t come to spaces because of the sounds emanating from them; they look for other points of attraction. “This can sound New Agey,” Sirvage continued, “but maybe there really is a flow of energy—an electrical path—that we can become aware of that indicates that something significant happened here.”
This is obviously a tenuous point, and Sirvage didn’t push it too hard, but I came away from our conversation feeling that he may be right and that, at the least, the Deaf have an intense capacity to tune in to how people have navigated a given architectural setting over time. This deepens the pull of spaces they care about. Here as well, the layering of silent meaning onto physical space could enhance the experience for the hearing. It doesn’t have to be thought of as mystical. The marks of usage that were so important to Sen Rikyu in the teahouse performed the same function—suggesting a story, creating negative space for the imaginative life of the participants to unfold in.
BREAK INTO SILENCE
I asked Bauman what he felt he’d learned from working with the Deaf. He scratched his shock of bright white hair and pushed his black glasses higher up his nose. “There was a moment,” he said, “that I’ll never forget. It was about a year and a half into working on Deaf Space. I was still living at the time in a small apartment in San Francisco that overlooked the city toward the East Bay—commuting back and forth to D.C.—working around the clock on trying to hammer out the initial concept for the plans.” One day, he said, he was sitting before the window of his apartment, staring at the view. A deep silence filled the room. In the visual field closest to him, he looked over the architecture of rooftop elements belonging to other buildings; in the middle ground was the city of San Francisco itself; far off were the hills. As he gazed off through the glass, Bauman said, he suddenly felt “cold chills” go through him, “and the whole scene became totally different. Now I’m not looking out the window, the view was no longer a painting on the wall, I’m in the picture. I’m part of
the system.” He made the motion of a wave with his hand. “The same soil underneath my building carries on beneath the other buildings before me and the city farther off, and then swells up to form the hills. It was a visceral understanding of being in the world.”
Bauman’s description of this moment made me remember an interview I’d seen with the Dalai Lama in which he recounted the process of contemplating the mandala, a diagram of the cosmos used to focus meditation. “The main thing is visualization,” he said, “the reminder of our visualization contained in the actual mandala. First you meditate on shunya, emptiness, then that very mind which is completely absorbed in outward nature becomes transformed into the physical world.”
As Bauman began working to implement the notion of a unifying substrate into campus design, he discovered something was missing. He devised architectural solutions to promote the flow of motion around campus—strategies like increasing transparency and eliminating sharp turnoffs in passageways. Yet the further he and his colleagues went in developing these principles, the more they found it necessary to break up the flow in ways that would give people a respite, “privacy, a degree of enfolding enclosure, opportunities for stationary conversation.” As an example, he asked me to imagine “a garden wall that would provide a place to lean back against, providing a sense of safety, but also radiating heat. Maybe there’s a tree nearby providing shade and dappled light.” What he had discovered, he told me, was that for the design of the campus to work, it depended on the creation of “holes in the fabric.” Holes were, he said, in fact, “the central element that ties the fabric together.” The holes, he concluded, are the silences.
Bauman is aware of the fragility of the Deaf Space project in an atmosphere of general economic retrenchment. Between cochlear implants, improved hearing aids, advances in the ability to teach oral speech to Deaf children, and the ability of the Deaf to communicate via the Internet in a manner identical to their hearing counterparts, there are increasingly voices being raised questioning why the Deaf need to be educated in a setting where sign language is the principal mode of communication.
But whatever happens to Deaf Space, it’s an extraordinary experiment, one we could all learn from. In all my experiences with sound, what I’d been most conscious of was overstimulation and our collective fear of the silent interval. Of course we cannot learn to replicate the singularity of Deaf vision, but that doesn’t mean that more silence wouldn’t enhance our ability to see. Even a very brief reduction in stimulus from one sense can trigger a heightened perceptual rush in another. On one occasion, I trooped around Columbus Circle in Manhattan with a peculiar group called PDM that promotes spontaneous group meditation. At a prearranged signal, our little band would all drop into a sitting position on a street corner and close our eyes. By the third time we did this, the sound around the circle—of which I’d frankly been oblivious—became overwhelmingly loud. The next time I stopped moving and shut my eyes, I instantly felt I was listening to the soundtrack of a terrifying horror movie. Try it. Go to some corner where you live. Stop where you are and shut your eyes for a few minutes. You’ll be surprised by what you hear.
I had to leave Gallaudet to catch a flight, but as I stepped outside, the drama of the sunlight stopped me in my tracks. I was alone on the campus mall. The moving clouds created patterns that arose and dissolved, casting into luminescence and shadow every leaf, stone, wall, and open space. I flashed back to the Quaker Meeting House where I’d been at the very beginning of my pursuit of silence.
Louis Kahn once proposed that the entire notion of a division between silence and light might, in fact, be artificial, since together they composed what he called “the ambient soul.” It’s common for mystics to speak of their experiences of the transcendent—experiences often precipitated by silence—in terms of intensifying illumination. But the link may not be only spiritual. Perhaps we really do see a brighter light when we are in silence.
In the essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of how the sun “illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines in the eye and the heart of the child.” Yet in the quiet landscape of the natural world, the “spirit of infancy” could be recovered. In the hour of quiet contemplation “mean egotism vanishes,” Emerson wrote: “I become a transparent eyeball—I am nothing; I see all.” Instead of helping us feel ownership of space, an architecture of silence might bring home the fact that we are part of what we gaze upon.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Silent Finale
When I stepped out into the sunlight at Gallaudet, I finally grasped the deeper reason why my mounting frustrations with the battle against noise had not left me demoralized: all the while I’d been probing the psychological and sociological limits of our ability to stop the din, I’d been interspersing my investigations with experiences of silence. Many of these had been lovely; a few even approached the sublime. In the midst of all the doom and boom, breathtaking silences are still out there, awaiting our attention.
On top of this, I’d found that, with a few villainous exceptions, the people I encountered who were, so to speak, on the pro-noise side of the debate, were more complex and frankly just more likable than I’d expected them to be. To my happy surprise I even received an e-mail from Leanne Flask nine months after I visited the mall announcing that she’d resigned from DMX to start her own music-design business, which was to have a major philanthropic component aimed at enriching children’s understanding of music so that they can become advocates for keeping music education in the school system.
By and large, the unabashed noise lovers I met seemed to me to be exactly as barbaric as was the greater society in which we mostly live today. That’s to say, as barbaric as we choose to make them out to be, leaving aside aspects of their character we elect not to listen for because they squelch our caricature. If we use affinity for noise as a criterion for judging a person’s degree of civilization, there’s no great distinction between the erstwhile Boom THUG bumping down the streets of Bed-Stuy and the well-coutured young professional commuting to the gym with her personal sound device pumped to bump her own brain cells. The us-or-them divide doesn’t hold. We may feel that all the noise of the age is simply too much and that we must either make an all-out assault against it or retreat into our own personal version of the monastery. Or we may determine that in the crisscrossing nuances of the dilemma there are unexpected opportunities.
My last lesson in the unpredictable interplay between noise and silence occurred in connection with worms. Inside a neurobiology laboratory, I saw how easy it was to reawaken our wonder at listening to what only becomes audible when the world quiets down.
In a famous passage from The Origin of Species, Darwin writes: “It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.” Darwin makes the silent evolutionary process itself the supreme agent of differentiation and, in the action of distinguishing, of the amelioration of the world.
Darwin also had a keen ear for the contradictions that accompany noise and silence. While exploring the coast of Brazil, Darwin wrote of how “a most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady part of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud, that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign.” Darwin knew that these paradoxes are never more poignant than when they’re manifest in human nature. In his autobiography, he recounts an amusing story of a dinner he had with Thomas Carlyle, of the not-so-soundproof study. Carlyle, Darwin wrote, “silenced every one by haranguing during the whole dinner on the advantages of silence.”
One of Darwin’s great heroes in the epic of natural selection is the
worm. The supremely unprepossessing worm that turns the soil in silence, sifting and reconstituting the earth’s composition as a by-product of its own digestive process, Darwin found emblematic of the way all work ought to be performed. The worm has neither the capacity nor need to make a noise about its achievement. And while its stature could not be more lowly, its accomplishment outstrips that of the most cultivated farmer. Darwin writes, “The agriculturist in ploughing the ground follows a method strictly natural; he only imitates in a rude manner … the work which nature is daily performing by the agency of the earthworm.”
The worms I chose to look at were members of the nematode species graced with a Latin name that means “ancient, elegant rod.” At one millimeter in length, Caenorhabditis elegans is even tinier and lowlier than the earthworm. Yet when it was selected as genetic research subjects in the late 1960s, the dream was that this little creature would enable us to understand the entire nervous system. Scientists believed that if you could characterize its every neuron, discover their locations and the neurotransmitters they use, all the secrets of the human brains would be revealed. It hasn’t quite worked out this way. But the revelations provided by the worms are still legion. The first complete genome of a multicellular organism to be sequenced belonged to C. elegans. And today some of the most important research into RNA transpires through their simple bodies. No less than the service of astronaut Suni Williams, whom I had sought out at the beginning of my research for her insights into the noiseless depths of outer space, the service of the nematodes struck me as worthy of a moment of silent observation.
In Pursuit of Silence Page 23