A History of Architectural Acoustics: Amplifying and Silencing Sounds

Yet while Citterio’s contemporary technology builds on a long history of engineering sound via architecture and design, it also runs counter to much of the historical treatment of sound within space – a history that has often emphasised amplification, rather than absorption, of sound. The La Valltorta gorge is one example of this phenomenon, and so too is the Epidaurus theatre in Greece – a space that has always shouted about being an acoustically optimised workplace. In the 4th century BCE, its architects created a curving, tiered theatre where a performer could project their voice to 14,000 spectators at a time. Legend had it that any audience member could hear a match struck on stage from any seat in the theatre; although when students from Eindhoven University of Technology used microphones to investigate, they found that, realistically, you’d have to be sitting fairly close to the stage. Archaeoacoustics strikes again.

By the 20th century, these ideas were being pushed even further, as the everyday world became significantly louder. Cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, aeroplanes began to roar across the sky, and mass transit systems shuttled people on their noisy way to work. And at work, silence was not to be found either. In 1906, 13 years before Sabine died, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright created the first open-plan office in Buffalo, New York. The Larkin Administration Building was designed like a factory floor, with office furniture made of metal. Magnesite, a mineral with acoustic properties, was shipped over from Greece and used everywhere in the building, from the floors to the desktops, to absorb the office sounds. By the 1940s, the fortunes of the Larkin Company had declined, and its flagship office was later demolished – but in Europe its idea for the open-plan office had taken off, with non-hierarchical seating arrangements appealing to postwar ideals of social democracy. But while the abolishment of the boss’s corner office may have been one thing, the reverberating sounds of scores of people talking and typing with no walls to impede the noise was quite another.

This has been Citterio’s concern for decades, resulting in the creation of the Citterio Sound System, or C-SS. Composed of partition walls formed of high-tech polyester fabric on wood particle backing with aluminium frames, C-SS can be manipulated to create pockets of quiet and privacy within clattering and buzzing open-plan offices. Its most popular application is for meeting rooms, where it is important that attendees can hear each other without distraction, while their conversations remain private. Yet C-SS has a multitude of uses, from creating break rooms for moments of calm in workers’ days, to reading rooms for quiet study.

Acoustic design has come a long way through time and place, from the ancient amphitheatres designed to amplify sound through reverberation, to Sabine’s theatre cushions applied to dampen unwanted sounds in an Ivy League lecture hall. C-SS is part of that history, representing the research that has resulted in office products that can create pockets of sound control that at once embody thousands of years of technological advancement, yet recall the rocky overhangs that sheltered the prehistoric artists of La Valltorta gorge as they went about their creative work in perfect resonance.