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B+U: Envisioning a city of sound

By Ingrid Spencer

Talk about frozen music. Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu, partners in the nine-year-old, Los Angeles–based architecture firm B+U, have found a way to turn sound into buildings. The two architects, along with a software engineer from MIT, created Soundplot—software developed to analyze and transform sound waves into three dimensions.

Photo courtesy B+U

To view more of B+U's sound-to-structure process, click here.

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Baumgartner and Uriu met while working for Gehry Partners. Inspired by their own separate backgrounds in electronic music, Baumgartner and Uriu decided to take their fascination with sound to the next level—they see the ephemeral qualities of sound translated to built structures as a unique way to connect people to their environments. The architects’ first foray into actualizing their idea is Sound City, an urban development study for the 12 city blocks that make up Broadway Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles. B+U’s concept is to create a variety of public spaces and mixed-use developments determined not only by zoning regulations, sight lines, and the city grid, but also shaped by on-site recordings. The architects recorded ambient sound along a series of longitudinal and cross sections through the site. They then mapped the sound waves through Soundplot, transforming the waves into a 3D wireframe that can then be developed into a structure.

While the sound waves inform the shape of the building, Baumgartner and Uriu say the structure obviously has to work within the usual architectural constraints of any building—budget, program, site, materials, and so on. “But sound is a tool to begin the design process,” says Baumgartner. “It’s a point of departure.”

According to Baumgartner and Uriu, translated sound can act as a unique, attention-getting design tool in many public venues, as evidenced by B+U’s announcement system for the Museums Quarter in Vienna. The unbuilt structure is an information system designed to draw street traffic to the quarter. B+U recorded and analyzed the phonetics of the words “museums quarter” and translated the analysis to 3D. The 3D billboard draws passersby in with its unusual form and LED graphics—a physical and subliminal lure.

While the architects admit that without explanation, buildings translated from sound come across as simply curiously shaped structures, they also think there’s something wonderful about a new skyline shaped by street noise and other urban sounds. “It was Plato who said that the visible is just a shadow of the invisible,” says Uriu. Baumgartner concurs. “This research has changed how we look at the city,” he says. “We’d hope it would do that for others, or at least sharpen their awareness of acoustical space.”

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