In Pursuit of Silence (36 page)

Sirvage has spent a great deal of time videoing the movement of Deaf and hearing people through the same space. When I watched some of these videos, I saw what he was talking about—it’s as though an invisible tether links the steps of Deaf people in conversation, in a manner that simply has no equivalent in the motion of the hearing. Hansel Bauman believes there’s an architectural corollary to this—space that helps people remain in each other’s visual embrace.

I got a sense of how this might work when Sirvage took me on a tour of the campus. He wanted to show me two places, he said. One that students shunned, but which had been built as a gathering point, and another which they themselves had made their main gathering point.

The first place he took me was in front of one of the central campus buildings. He asked me to sit down on one of two facing benches. There were high brick walls at my back juxtaposed at
different angles, and various shrubs configured around the seating areas. Sirvage watched me carefully, and broke into a laugh when I found myself irresistibly drawn to turn around—several times in the course of a few minutes. Then he pointed out how, because of the juxtaposition of wall lines and plantings, there was no way anyone sitting on one of the benches could see another person approaching. Every arrival was a surprise, and—especially in the absence of auditory signals—this made for an uncomfortable sense of vulnerability. Even with the ability to hear, I felt jittery because the space left me without a visual tether to the larger world.

Sirvage smiled when I said this and noted that in the Canadian state of Ottawa, where he is originally from, there is a museum built without a single straight line or hard corner. It was all curves he said, because the Native Americans believed that devils lurk in corners. (Zen gardens also incorporate the idea that demons can only travel in straight lines.) Another touchstone for Deaf Architecture is a notion developed by the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. Köhler invented two nonsense words,
“maluma” and “takete
,” to illustrate the spatial associations we bring to different sounds. While maluma evokes images of soft, curvilinear, maternal forms, takete conjures sharp, angular shapes. Surveys indicate that the Deaf overwhelmingly opt for design elements reflecting maluma-type patterns. Sirvage mentioned to me that there is no sign for a square shape.

The second location Sirvage took me to was an expanse of cement at the entrance to a dorm. The building itself was an unimpressive, drab, modern space. I gave Sirvage a questioning look and asked whether this was really the hot spot he’d meant to
show me. He gave a mischievous grin. I turned back to the vista before me and when I made myself sink into the place for a few minutes, I did feel something calming. I became conscious that I was looking over an unusually open view—the exact opposite of the previous location. But Sirvage showed me something further, which had not factored into my conscious impressions. By a fortuitous alignment of buildings, landscaping, and roads, the peripheral sight lines where I was standing were as spacious and open as the center of the visual field. “To me,” Sirvage said, “this place embodies ideas of silence, the peace we associate with quiet.”

In fact, research has established that the Deaf have greater peripheral vision than the hearing. An architecture that embodies Deaf awareness of a wider peripheral field might help to conjure the mental state we yearn for in silence.

There’s another possibility as well, one involving meta physical sight lines. Sirvage told me how important the idea of showing the history of a building’s use was to Deaf Space. “A scuffed floor communicates to us,” he said, “because of what it says about how people interact with a space.” Deaf people don’t come to spaces because of the sounds emanating from them; they look for other points of attraction. “This can sound New Agey,” Sirvage continued, “but maybe there really is a flow of energy—an electrical path—that we can become aware of that indicates that something significant happened here.”

This is obviously a tenuous point, and Sirvage didn’t push it too hard, but I came away from our conversation feeling that he may be right and that, at the least, the Deaf have an intense capacity to tune in to how people have navigated a given
architectural setting over time. This deepens the pull of spaces they care about. Here as well, the layering of silent meaning onto physical space could enhance the experience for the hearing. It doesn’t have to be thought of as mystical. The marks of usage that were so important to Sen Rikyu in the teahouse performed the same function—suggesting a story, creating negative space for the imaginative life of the participants to unfold in.

I asked Bauman what he felt he’d learned from working with the Deaf. He scratched his shock of bright white hair and pushed his black glasses higher up his nose. “There was a moment,” he said, “that I’ll never forget. It was about a year and a half into working on Deaf Space. I was still living at the time in a small apartment in San Francisco that overlooked the city toward the East Bay—commuting back and forth to D.C.—working around the clock on trying to hammer out the initial concept for the plans.” One day, he said, he was sitting before the window of his apartment, staring at the view. A deep silence filled the room. In the visual field closest to him, he looked over the architecture of rooftop elements belonging to other buildings; in the middle ground was the city of San Francisco itself; far off were the hills. As he gazed off through the glass, Bauman said, he suddenly felt “cold chills” go through him, “and the whole scene became totally different. Now I’m not looking out the window, the view was no longer a painting on the wall,
I’m in the picture. I’m part of the system
.” He made the motion of a wave with his hand. “The same soil underneath my building carries on beneath the other buildings
before me and the city farther off, and then swells up to form the hills. It was a visceral understanding of being in the world.”

Bauman’s description of this moment made me remember an interview I’d seen
with the Dalai Lama
in which he recounted the process of contemplating the mandala, a diagram of the cosmos used to focus meditation. “The main thing is visualization,” he said, “the reminder of our visualization contained in the actual mandala. First you meditate on
shunya
, emptiness, then that very mind which is completely absorbed in outward nature becomes transformed into the physical world.”

As Bauman began working to implement the notion of a unifying substrate into campus design, he discovered something was missing. He devised architectural solutions to promote the flow of motion around campus—strategies like increasing transparency and eliminating sharp turnoffs in passageways. Yet the further he and his colleagues went in developing these principles, the more they found it necessary to break up the flow in ways that would give people a respite, “privacy, a degree of enfolding enclosure, opportunities for stationary conversation.” As an example, he asked me to imagine “a garden wall that would provide a place to lean back against, providing a sense of safety, but also radiating heat. Maybe there’s a tree nearby providing shade and dappled light.” What he had discovered, he told me, was that for the design of the campus to work, it depended on the creation of “holes in the fabric.” Holes were, he said, in fact, “the central element that ties the fabric together.” The holes, he concluded, are the silences.

Bauman is aware of the fragility of the Deaf Space project in an atmosphere of general economic retrenchment. Between cochlear implants, improved hearing aids, advances in the ability to teach oral speech to Deaf children, and the ability of the Deaf to communicate via the Internet in a manner identical to their hearing counterparts, there are increasingly voices being raised questioning why the Deaf need to be educated in a setting where sign language is the principal mode of communication.

But whatever happens to Deaf Space, it’s an extraordinary experiment, one we could all learn from. In all my experiences with sound, what I’d been most conscious of was overstimulation and our collective fear of the silent interval. Of course we cannot learn to replicate the singularity of Deaf vision, but that doesn’t mean that more silence wouldn’t enhance our ability to see. Even a very brief reduction in stimulus from one sense can trigger a heightened perceptual rush in another. On one occasion, I trooped around Columbus Circle in Manhattan with a peculiar
group called PDM
that promotes spontaneous group meditation. At a prearranged signal, our little band would all drop into a sitting position on a street corner and close our eyes. By the third time we did this, the sound around the circle—of which I’d frankly been oblivious—became overwhelmingly loud. The next time I stopped moving and shut my eyes, I instantly felt I was listening to the soundtrack of a terrifying horror movie. Try it. Go to some corner where you live. Stop where you are and shut your eyes for a few minutes. You’ll be surprised by what you hear.

I had to leave Gallaudet to catch a flight, but as I stepped outside, the drama of the sunlight stopped me in my tracks. I was alone on the campus mall. The moving clouds created patterns that arose and dissolved, casting into luminescence and shadow every leaf, stone, wall, and open space. I flashed back to the Quaker Meeting House where I’d been at the very beginning of my pursuit of silence.

Louis Kahn once proposed that the entire notion of a division between silence and light might, in fact, be artificial, since together they composed what he called
“the ambient soul.”
It’s common for mystics to speak of their experiences of the transcendent—experiences often precipitated by silence—in terms of intensifying illumination. But the link may not be only spiritual. Perhaps we really do see a brighter light when we are in silence.

In the essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of how the sun “illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines in the eye and the heart of the child.” Yet in the quiet landscape of the natural world, the “spirit of infancy” could be recovered. In the hour of quiet contemplation “mean egotism vanishes,” Emerson wrote: “I become a transparent eyeball—I am nothing; I see all.” Instead of helping us feel ownership of space, an architecture of silence might bring home the fact that we are part of what we gaze upon.

Silent Finale

When I stepped out into the sunlight at Gallaudet, I finally grasped the deeper reason why my mounting frustrations with the battle against noise had not left me demoralized: all the while I’d been probing the psychological and sociological limits of our ability to stop the din, I’d been interspersing my investigations with experiences of silence. Many of these had been lovely; a few even approached the sublime. In the midst of all the doom and boom, breathtaking silences are still out there, awaiting our attention.

On top of this, I’d found that, with a few villainous exceptions, the people I encountered who were, so to speak, on the pro-noise side of the debate, were more complex and frankly just more likable than I’d expected them to be. To my happy surprise I even received an e-mail from Leanne Flask nine months after I visited the mall announcing that she’d resigned from DMX to start her own music-design business, which was to have a major philanthropic component aimed at enriching children’s understanding
of music so that they can become advocates for keeping music education in the school system.