Breaking the Sound Barriers

“The goal,” says Karen Van Lengen, FAIA, “is to enrich the social environment in the home—to get people to take off their ear-buds and look up from their laptops. To listen to what’s happening outside and to each other.” Image courtesy Joel Sander Architect.

By Lisa Goff

A common concern about digital technologies is that they encourage users to screen out the local landscapes, along with any people who might be sitting next to them on the bus or at the dinner table. With Mix House, Karen Van Lengen, FAIA, proposes a way to use digital technologies to bring people together—to screen in local surroundings rather then screening them out.

Mix House is collaboration between Van Lengen, a chaired professor and former dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, and two New York designers: media artist Ben Rubin, founder of EAR Studio and Joel Sanders, AIA, of Joel Sanders Architect. Originally created for a 2007 exhibition at Vitra Design Museum in Berlin, Mix House was recently added to the permanent collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mix House is composed of three distinct, sound-gathering volumes outfitted with three audiovisual “sonic windows.” Image courtesy Joel Sanders Architect.

The design, for a house on a generic suburban lot, mixes sound on two levels. First, “sonic windows,” embedded with microphones and tiny cameras, capture images and sounds from outside the house and broadcast them inside. Second, the house encourages family members to mix, layer, and juxtapose pre-recorded sounds with those collected from outside. Think bluebirds chirping along with Beyonce, or the postman slamming the mailbox shut at a climactic moment in a Beethoven symphony.

“We wanted to create a house that would not only see, but listen,” says Van Lengen. By layering sounds from multiple sources, family members create original “soundscapes” and little suburban symphonies unique to each family’s domestic landscape. “The goal is to make music out of the specificity of these locations,” says Van Lengen.

Mix House is composed of three distinct, sound-gathering volumes outfitted with three audiovisual “sonic windows.” In one, a curved, sliding-glass entry door is trained on the front yard. In another, a rotating picture window in the living and dining areas faces the back yard and, in the third, a skylight in the bedroom harvests sights and sounds from the sky overhead. Sounds are amplified and broadcast over an interior sound system. The sonic windows (and corresponding video screens) operate from a central command center located in the waterproof countertop in the kitchen—for the designers, the communal heart of the twenty-first century suburban home.

Ideally, Van Lengen says, family members will congregate in the Mix Kitchen to design original soundscapes that combine “found sounds” with samples from other media. Design drawings and a digital simulation of Mix House are on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through October in the exhibition “Highlights from the Architecture and Design Collection V2.0.” Van Lengen says her goal is to construct a prototype of the Mix House on a suburban lot near Charlottesville. She is also working to develop a “dictionary of sounds” associated with famous public spaces.

“The goal,” says Van Lengen, “is to enrich the social environment in the home—to get people to take off their ear-buds and look up from their laptops. To listen to what’s happening outside and to each other.”

Lisa Goff is a writer living in Charlottesville, Virginia.