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VOICES OF TRANQUILITY
Silence in art and architecture
Juhani Pallasmaa
Only in complete silence one starts to hear; only when language resigns, one starts to see.1
Carthusian Monks, Grand Chartreuse
Loss of silence and time
“Nothing has changed the nature of Man so much as the loss of silence,” the Swiss philosopher Max Picard argues in his remarkable book The World of Silence (written in1948).2 The nearly seven decades that have passed since the publication of the book have only made the philosopher’s concern more urgent. The oppressive thought that we may be losing the innate silence of our souls is becoming increasingly evident. Today we can even catch ourselves escaping silence into excessive noise in our panicked search for privacy and intimacy. This pathological reversal of behavior makes me think of Erich Fromm’s thought provokingly paradoxical theme of “escape from freedom” in his seminal book with this very title.3 We seek freedom obsessively, but as Fyodor Dostoyevsky has already suggested, when we, pitiful human beings, finally have it, we do not know what to do with it, and we end up voluntarily closing up the very door to freedom.
The loss of silence and freedom is accompanied with the continued escalation of speed. In the fifteenth century the clocks of Nuremberg began to strike every quarter hour, and, as Marcel Proust recalls, the measure of minutes arose to human consciousness with the introduction of railway traffic. Now our digital watches measure time in seconds. Isn’t it absurd to remember in the morning the precise clock reading when you happened to wake up for a moment at night? Through its exaggerated numerical precision, the reading of time has lost its analogic correspondence with the course of the sun as well as its human meanings. Experiential time has withered into a mere numerical fact. At the same time, we have unnoticeably turned our body position in relation to the progression of time. The Greeks understood that the future came from behind their backs while the past receded away in front of their eyes. We have turned our face towards the future and the past is disappearing behind our backs.4
“The world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed,” Filippo Marinetti declared in the Futurist Manifesto in the 1920s.5 Paul Virilio, the architect–philosopher, has recently remarked that the most important product of the contemporary culture is speed. Yet, Milan Kundera makes the alarming observation about the relationship of speed and memory, “The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”6 Aren’t we on our way to total amnesia through the constant acceleration of the speed of life?
Our effort to avoid boredom strengthens the desire for newness. But as the Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen suggests, the obsession with newness is bound to result in repetition and, eventually, in boredom. “As the new is searched only because of its newness, everything becomes identical, because it has no other properties but its newness,” Svendsen laments.7
Fragments of silence
“Silence no longer exists as a world, but only in fragments, as the remains of a world. And as man is always frightened by remains, so he is frightened by the remains of silence,” Picard reasons.8 We are, indeed, frightened by fragments of silence, as they reveal to us our sad loss of domicile and home. These fragments also make us conscious of our fundamental loneliness, an experience that we nowadays tend to escape into a collective identity through cultural noise, mass communication, entertainment, and fashion. The primal stillness of the world – I would like to say the ontological silence of the universe – is increasingly contaminated and eradicated by cultural noise and clatter, in the same way that the primal darkness is polluted by man-made light. This loss of silence and benevolent darkness reflects the disastrous secularization and materialization of life. Our sphere of life becomes filled with racket, “visual noise” and an excessive abundance of disturbing and distracting stimuli. The world is losing its mystery and poetry as well as its sensuous appeal. In my view, the grand task of art is to re-create and maintain the mythical, poetic and sensuous reality of the world.
Silence of nature
As the opposite of our noisy lifestyle today, tranquility is a contemplative, mystical and solemn state. The silence of nature evokes a pantheistic experience, which connects us with cosmic dimensions. This silence also evokes the unity and singularity of the world and a sense of healing participation; I am part of the singularity of the world, not cast into an irreversible solitude and isolation.
Sounds of nature are not noise, as they reinforce nature’s primal causalities and quietude. The rippling of water, birds’ twitter, rustling of grass in the wind, or even the roar of thunder, strengthens the experience of the innate tranquility of nature. The sound of wind or a stream calms us as it makes us aware of the processes of nature and their underlying silence. More importantly, I am connected with my own self, and guided to experience a moment of wholeness. These sounds of nature are an essential ingredient of nature’s primal silence. As a consequence, even the most powerful voices of nature are comforting, as they enfold us in nature’s majestic logic and causality.
Sound arises from silence, not silence from sound. Silence slows down time and permits us to experience phenomena beyond our normal awareness. Just think of the slow time and quietude in Anton Chekhov’s first novel, Steppe, where the reader’s mind is slowed down and sensitized to hear and follow the flight of a single fly.
The notion and experience of silence is evidently connected with emptiness, the concept that is central in eastern thinking. Emptiness is the spatial and visual equivalent of the primarily aural experience of silence. However, the senses constantly interact, and both experiences can be sensed through vision and hearing. In fact both silence and emptiness invite subtle multi-sensory experiences, as if they were voids that invoke imaginary sensations.
Silence is not merely an auditory experience of the absence of sound; it is a multi-sensory and existential experience of being, rather than of listening. It is this existential “thickness” and richness of silence that gives it its poetic authority. Silence reveals the essence of things, as if it were perceived by the human senses for the first time. Silence is an atmospheric and qualitative perception that fuses the percept and the perceiver. It is always an affective experience, as silence is not outside me, it is my very soul that has been silenced.
Silence in the arts
The significance of silence for music, poetry and other arts is clear enough. “Poetry comes out of silence and yearns for silence,” Picard writes.9 Also great paintings and architecture arise from and create tranquility. “It must be immense, this silence, in which sounds and movements have room,” Rainer Maria Rilke advices the aspiring poet Kappus in his touching book Letters to a Young Poet.10 For Rilke, silence is always accompanied by solitude: “Works of art are of an infinite solitude,” and “what is necessary, after all, is only this, vast inner solitude.”11 He maintains that solitude and silence are essential for a poet, and, I would suggest, it is also essential for an architect or any artist, for that matter. But are we able to tolerate solitude and silence in our current lifestyle?
The paintings of Piero della Francesca, Johannes Vermeer and J.M.W. Turner silence all sound. The events of these paintings take place as if carved into a beautiful marble of silence. Regardless of today’s tendency towards increasing noise also in art, the greatest of modern and contemporary paintings are impressive spaces of tranquility. The subject matter of Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings is eternal immobility and tranquility. His timid objects seek support and safety from each other, evoking the most haunting question of all: why do things exist, rather than not? The paintings of Claude Monet project vague sounds, like the ripple of water, or the sound of peaceful breathing. The artistic tranquility is the silence of existence. As Constantin Brancusi advices us, “Art must give immediately, all at once, the shock of life, a sensation of breathing.”12
The stillness in the images of the metaphysical painters seems to draw the spectator into the vacuum of their muteness; this is a threatening voicelessness, the suffocation of sound. The smoke of a train that frequently appears in De Chirico’s paintings emphasizes the total soundlessness of the space. If the moist air in Monet’s paintings is meant to be felt by the skin, these paintings are heard as much as seen.
I would like to argue that all great painters paint silence. Just look at the soft silence of the light in Mark Rothko’s paintings! Masterful architecture, likewise, evokes silence. This stillness of the arts is not a mere absence of sound, but an original sensory and mental state, an observing, listening and knowing quietude. It brings us back to a beginning. It is a mental state, which evokes a feeling of melancholy, as it reminds us of our own transitory nature and irretrievably lost innocence. At the same time, it integrates our sense of self and existence with our very being in the world.
Silence in architectural experience
A powerful architectural experience eliminates noise and turns our consciousness to ourselves, to our own existential experience. Just think of the materialized silence of Romanesque monasteries and convents, which fuse light and silence into a singular haptic experience. Also the contemporary church interiors of Alvar Aalto and Juha Leiviskä in Finland are cast similarly in a benevolent and therapeutic silence. In any impressive architectural or artistic space, we hear only our own heartbeat. The innate silence of this experience results, it seems to me, from the fact that the work focuses our attention on our own inner experience; the work re-orientates my very sense of being. I find myself listening to my own existence. The mental task of art is to concretize our being in the world and to make us conscious of our selves. The painter wants “to make visible how the world touches us,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes our experience of Paul Cézanne’s paintings.13 Also all meaningful architecture mediates and structures our experience and understanding of the world, or perhaps, understanding our being in the world. Moreover, architecture makes visible how the world touches us. The art of architecture should create, safeguard and maintain silence. As architects, we need to follow Søren Kierkegaard’s advice: “Create silence! Bring men to silence!”14
The language of architecture is the drama of tranquility. Great buildings are silence turned into matter, and in its very essence architecture is petrified stillness. As the racket and clatter of construction work fades away, as the shouting of workers ceases, the building turns into a timeless monument of quietude. And what a silent faithfulness and patience can be felt in old buildings! They safeguard their silences in the folds of their material structures, and embrace us with this extraordinary treasure. Experiencing architecture is not only a matter of appreciating spaces, forms and surfaces, it is also a way of listening to the building’s characteristic silence. Every great building has its unique voice of tranquility, and there are indications that early human constructions in history were actually conceived for hearing rather than vision.
Through specific architectural silences, we can experience the lifestyles and temporal rhythms of past cultures, and also the experience of the depth of time resides in these magnificent silences. As we enter a Gothic cathedral, we can feel its ancient, embracing silence as a haptic sensation that evokes images of past rituals and forms of life, and invites us to imagine echoes of Gregorian chants bouncing off the ribbed vaults. This is a tactile silence with a deep memory. This is a haptic silence, experienced by the skin rather than the ears. This experience of haptic silence with a distinct gravity is not limited to pre-modern structures: as we enter Crown Hall in Chicago by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Kimbell Art Museum of Louis Kahn in Fort Worth, or the Thermal Baths at Vals by Peter Zumthor, we are struck by the majestic calm and stillness of these spaces. Our ears appreciate each in consonance with the eyes and the body. Great artistic experiences always strengthen and unify our sense of self.
Light and silence
Light belongs to silence, whereas the stillness of night is mere lack of sound; night is a sleeping sound. Silence and light create the innermost essence, the mental core, of architecture. “Sun never knows how great it is until it hits the side of a building, or shines inside a room,” Louis Kahn remarks.15 Paradoxically, every silence has its sound; the great Mexican architect, Luis Barragan spoke of the “placid murmur of silence,” and you can hear it in his spaces as the colored light touches your skin like a warm liquid.16 Great architecture is a true art of alchemy: light turns into a liquid and a tactile sensation; gravity turns into a thought; silence into sound; and matter into emotion. The greatest silences that I have experienced are the Pharaonic silence of the Karnak temple, the Roman silence of the Pantheon, and the whispering silences of the Japanese Zen gardens, such as Ryōan-ji in Kyoto.
Picard writes perceptively and poetically of the significance of silence for architecture. “The colonnades of the Greek temples are like boundary lines along the silence. They become ever straighter and ever whiter as they lean against the silence … Wandering amongst the Greek pillars is a wandering in a radiant silence,” he writes. “Just as ivy grows round a wall for centuries, so the cathedrals have grown around the silence. They are built around the silence.”17 Picard speaks of cathedrals as “museums of silence,” and of Greek statues as “vessels,” or “white islands of silence.”18 For this philosopher of silence, even “the forest is a great reservoir of silence out of which the silence trickles in a thin, slow stream and fills the air with its brightness.”19
The calming, protecting and healing silence of the forest has a special mental meaning for us Nordic people. For us the forest is the parents’ comforting embrace and the mother’s protective womb, whereas the Central Europeans usually fear the darkness and silence of the forest. We escape danger into the forest, whereas central Europeans run away from the forest.
Two architectures
It is useful to distinguish between two architectures in our time: the architecture of form, on the one hand, and the architecture of essence, on the other. The architecture of form attempts to charm us with its excessive and loud manipulation of forms and suggestions. This architecture wants us to be concerned with itself, it wants to entertain us and entice our attention and senses. While the architecture of form aims at fashionable curiosities, the architecture of essence aspires for the timeless poetic content of life and architecture itself. It poeticizes the commonplace and casts an aura of uniqueness on the everyday. The architecture of essence focuses our attention on life, and it emancipates our senses and awakens an attending receptiveness and quietude.
In my view, architecture is a background phenomenon that creates settings for human events and acts of life. Yet, in all areas of communication and artistic expression, our consumerist culture tends to favor quick, forceful, noisy and emotionally overwhelming experiences. A commercially oriented image effect, a sort of an image shock, has gained popularity in the competition for the attention of the over-stimulated consumers. As a consequence, the architecture of today’s “society of spectacle,” is increasingly a product of sensationalism.20 Trying to compete with other media, architecture becomes an eye-catching image or a form of entertainment, creating an obsession with uniqueness and unforeseen novelty. But this is a misunderstanding of the role of architecture and its fundamental task as a framing device for perception and understanding as well as for the various events of life. The power of architecture is in its silent but perpetual presence and prestige in our daily lives. This persistent presence creates an unnoticeable frame of pre-understanding for our entire existential experience. We perceive, understand and remember through our architectural structures, and these settings are extensions and externalizations of our nervous system and consciousness.
Profound architecture does not dictate or force distinct behaviors, reactions and emotions. It is moderate, tactful and generous. Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher–writer, points out this necessary element of generosity in the art of literature:
The writer should not seek to overwhelm; otherwise he is in contradiction with himself; if he wishes to make demands he must propose only the task to be fulfilled. Hence the character of pure presentation which appears essential to the work of art. The reader must be able to make a certain aesthetic withdrawal. … Jean Genet justly calls it the author’s politeness towards the reader.21