GREG BAKER

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THIS THESIS PROJECT EXPLORES NOISE AS A BYPRODUCT OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM WITHIN A LARGER FRAMEWORK OF SOUND AS (SPATIAL) TERRITORY, BOTH PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. 1. THE HAIRBALL, SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA At the exit of a bike bridge facing the infamous Cesar Chavez Street Hairball, a pedestrian crosswalk confronts a freeway exit ramp around a blind turn. The small stop for pedestrians sign is smattered with yellow paint and barely legible, especially when driving. The best way to detect an approaching car is to listen. The curved, concrete retaining wall acts as a sound mirror, reflecting the hum of tires treading across asphalt and the rhythmic pulse of the engine directly into the face of people waiting at the stairs. This assumes you are coming from the side of the bike bridge exit; for those people coming from Potrero Avenue, they must listen much more carefully, because the angle of the wall directs the sound into the trees and surrounding environment. 2. AQUATIC PARK, BERKELEY CALIFORNIA The constant flow of freeway traffic under the pedestrian bridge is common for the East Bays many overpass bridges. What makes aquatic park unique is the negotiation of sound between pedestrians, the adjacent animal shelters animals and volunteers, plus the neighborhoods relatively few residents. The early morning sound of barking dogs and crowing roosters are mitigated by city noise ordinances, and one might assume that an animal shelter would fall under the jurisdiction of such ordinances. The proximity of the shelter to the freeway and its location in a non-residential zone seem to allow its exception to noise ordinance enforcement. The sacrifice here is the added stress of the freeway on the animals and volunteers who must walk dogs in the neighborhood. 3. BAYSIDE VILLAGE (SOUTH BEACH), SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA The touchdown of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco occurs in a residential neighborhood, creating an acoustically sensitive living situation. This particular area around the Bay Bridge Pumping Station features apartment and condominium housing with varying degrees of acoustical privacy from the bridge depending on the caliber of damping materials in each building. An alternative site with similar characteristics could be the houses along the BART tracks on Seventh Street in West Oakland. The Oakland scenario differs because the housing is single family and small apartment buildings, and the disruption from BART is heavy and periodic as opposed to the swelling and subsiding of a relatively constant humming from bridge traffic in the San Francisco scenario. 4. PIER 24, 26 & 28, SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA An eclectic mix of general contractors and a commercial diving and marine contractor inhabit the main piers underneath the Bay Bridge along the San Francisco waterfront. Also directly along a MUNI rail line, the soundscape here is a product of several layers of noise, including the bay itself and a nearby coffee house in the background. The potential here is to reveal the sites history through sound, much like the Art Ribbon project (Acconci, Saitowitz, Staufacher, 1991) pays homage to the old Embarcadero double-decker freeway that collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake. Where tugboats once tooted their way into the docks, piers 26 and 28 feature large indoor warehouse spaces suited for the contracting industry. Pier 24 is now a photography gallery, renovated after its thirty-year vacancy from 1980-2010.

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READING RESPONSE The site of sound consists of a medium, often air, and an environment, which provides surfaces that reflect that sound. Even our own ears use an elaborate system of reflection to guide sounds into our hearing organs. Every sound has what is called a sound envelope. This refers to four components (attack, decay, sustain, release) that describe the way a sound starts, initially drops in power, continues over some period of time, and then slowly disperses and disappears. In human sensing, whereas sight distances, hearing envelops (Leppert, Richard. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body. UC Press Berkeley 1993 p. 28). Most research in architectural acoustics assume that the concert hall, that most highly calibrated instrument of sound reflection, evolved from the ancient Greek (and Roman) natural amphitheaters. Far from the amphitheater, the private mansion gardens of Renaissance Europe are the true precursor to the modern concert hall (Leppert, p. 32). The relationship of privacy to the abatement of environmental noise would continue to develop into the turn of the century, as the first noise ordinance was enacted in New York City in 1907. By this time, however, a late industrial rhetoric of efficiency in the workplace was the primary argument for improving the urban soundscape. As a matter of fact, one mechanical engineer was single-handedly responsible for the efficiency craze in America (Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. MIT Press Cambridge 2002). Frederick Winslow Taylor was a household name, devoted to streamlining all industrial techniques of labor and management. His ideas gave rise to a set of rational agendas, outlined as logistic, tactical, and strategic rationality (deLanda, Manuel. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Zone New York 1991 p.106). By applying these rational theories to the development of the modern soundscape, the ways in which sound can be read as public and private territory will be interrogated. Architectural acoustics must expand from the science of the perfect concert hall to tackle the problem of noise at the urban scale, a planning conundrum rather than simply a wall detail dilemma.

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1. THE HAIRBALL, SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA

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2. AQUATIC PARK, BERKELEY CALIFORNIA

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3. BAYSIDE VILLAGE (SOUTH BEACH), SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA

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4. PIER 24, 26 & 28, SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA