Approximations: On Some Ways to Listen to a Building “in the Making”

Abstract

What sounds and noises does a future building make? How do architectural acousticians listen to a building in the making? How do you measure something that is not yet there? What is the epistemological status of approximations? Following the listening practices of acousticians as they measure a future experience of sound through a mock-up and of noise through an incomplete simulation, this article explores the challenge of fixing sound and noise as elusive objects of knowledge. Based on an ethnography of a building project, we see how architectural acousticians rely on what they call “approximations,” both the inscriptions and inscriptive work used to give traces of reality to future lived experiences of sound and noise that they hope “would be” there. Bringing together sound studies, ethnographies of architectural practice and science and technology studies accounts of inscription practices, the article argues for attention to be placed on the ephemera of knowledge and design practices, which allows analytic focus to remain upstream between the possible and the actual. Situated within the practices of the acousticians, we can witness some of the ways that sound and noise take shape within a building project, grosso modo.