Every building has a sound, whether its architect intended it or not.
The acoustic character of a space is as fundamental to its experiential quality as its visual character, and considerably harder to control. Light can be directed, excluded, filtered, and reflected with a precision that centuries of architectural practice have made relatively reliable. Sound behaves differently: it bends around corners, passes through walls, and reflects off surfaces with an efficiency that depends on the sound's frequency, the angle of incidence, and the material's specific acoustic properties. Designing a space with a specific acoustic intention requires a level of technical precision that most building types do not demand, and which, when it is demanded, has produced some of the most interesting architecture of the past century.
The concert hall is the clearest example. It is the only building type designed primarily for the ear, in which every spatial and material decision is evaluated first by how it will affect the behavior of sound. The size and shape of the room, the angle of every reflecting surface, the materials of the walls, ceiling, and floor, the geometry of the balconies: all of these are acoustic decisions before they are visual ones. The architect of a concert hall works in close collaboration with acoustic engineers, and this relationship has produced some of the most rigorous design processes in architecture.
Hans Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie, completed in 1963, overturned the conventional concert hall typology in a way that has influenced almost every major concert hall built since. The traditional concert hall placed the orchestra at one end of a rectangular room, with the audience arranged in front of it in a hierarchical seating arrangement that privileged certain positions over others. Scharoun placed the orchestra at the center and arranged the audience in terraced vineyard sections around it, so that every seat has a different yet equally direct relationship to the performers. The geometry of the room is irregular, with angled surfaces to distribute sound throughout the space rather than focus it in privileged areas.
The acoustic result is remarkable and was achieved through an unusual degree of empirical testing for its era. Scharoun worked with the acoustician Lothar Cremer over several years, testing models and adjusting surfaces to arrive at a room that produces the specific acoustic quality required by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra: warm and detailed, with a reverberation time that supports the orchestral repertoire the ensemble specializes in without blurring the individual instrumental lines.
Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House, which opened in 1973 after a famously troubled construction history, is a different kind of acoustic story. The building's two main halls were redesigned during construction after Utzon's departure, and the acoustic quality of the Concert Hall in particular has been a source of controversy since the building opened. A major renovation completed in 2022 addressed the most significant acoustic deficiencies by adding acoustic canopies above the stage and modifying the ceiling geometry to improve sound distribution. The building is architecturally extraordinary; its acoustic history is a lesson in the consequences of separating the visual and acoustic design of a concert hall.
The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, designed by Herzog and de Meuron and completed in 2017, is the most recent major statement in concert hall design. Its main hall, designed by the acoustic consultant Yasuhisa Toyota, seats 2,100 people in a vineyard arrangement with a maximum distance of thirty meters from any seat to the conductor. The curved, white acoustic panels that line the hall's surfaces, each one individually shaped by computer to distribute sound precisely, are also the hall's dominant visual element: the acoustic design is the architecture.
The acoustic quality of a building affects more than concert halls. The reverberation in a church affects the character of the liturgy. The acoustic isolation of a library reading room affects the quality of concentration possible within it. The sound of a hospital corridor affects the stress levels of patients who lie awake at night listening to it. The acoustic design of an office affects the productivity and wellbeing of the people who work in it. These are not secondary considerations. They are fundamental aspects of what a building is for.
We, as a culture, are better at thinking about what buildings look like than about what they sound like. This is partly because sound is invisible: we cannot photograph acoustic quality, and the architectural press is primarily visual in its coverage. But the body registers sound as directly as it registers light, and the quality of the acoustic environment is as consequential for the people who inhabit a building as any other aspect of its design.
Listen to the room you are in. It tells you something about the quality of the attention paid to you when it was made.