Studio Vulkan Landschaftsarchitektur, Sound Barrier Wall, 2014. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

Geography of Imagination: Poetic Infrastructure
“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is
always something to see. Something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make
a silence, we cannot...and this silence almost anywhere in the world today,
is traffic. If you listen to Beethoven, it’s always the same, but if you listen
to traffic, it’s always different.”
— John Cage

Cities, with their wild, uncontrolled unexpectedness, have always been
great sources of what British writer Alastair Bonnet refers to "geographical
imagination". With the ever increasing standardization of building
culture, including the building of cities and their open spaces, these
sources of inspiration have come under fire. Our projects look to reveal
the magical and unforeseen, imbueing open space with what Bonnet
might consider to be geographical re-enchantment.
Swiss law newly requires the construction of sound screens where noisy
streets pass residential areas. In 2014 Studio Vulkan won a competition
for artists to design an 800m long sound screen at the western entrance
to the City of Zürich. The city initiated the project as an attempt to recompose
the National Highway Authorities’ (ASTRA) standard wall design
into a more inspiring element.
Our design, currently in development, reinterprets this heavy duty urban
infrastructure and its typically negative associations into a catalyst for
the imagination. A variety of etched glass panels reframe, blur, and
abstract imagery of the surroundings. Reflected light, both natural and
artificial, casts and juxtaposes this specific imagery onto the glass panels
like an ephemeral, moving painting in real time, continuously telling a
sequence of site-specific stories. Each moment displays a new combination
of colors, textures, phenomena and movements.