BLDG BLOG, which you should probably be reading anyway, considers Mix House, an evocative & disturbing expansion of modernist transparency in architecture into sonic space. excerpt:
These “sonic windows” – or parabolic ornaments – amplify the audio setting of the house, thus making location, I’d think, several orders of magnitude more important than with many others works of architecture. . . Drunk homeowners mix burps with airplane roars, standing at an audio booth in the kitchen. Someone plays layered tape-loops of the sounds of their house from yesterday – which gets picked up by the neighbor and rebroadcast, with reverb, over the noise of a distant lawnmower. Enemy teenagers declare audio warfare, their microphones left open all night long. Paranoid husbands spy on all possible rivals.
*
But what if they’d moved the capital – a mere two miles? Or one mile – or twenty-five feet? The entire imperial capital picks up… and moves eight feet to the southwest. Thirty-five centimeters. The buildings themselves aren’t changed – though perhaps all the streets are renamed.
Meanwhile, everything looks the same.
Except…