Sound Art and Public Engagement in the Built Environment: Reflections from an Architecture Center

This article explores the deployment of sound in architectural-curatorial and community engagement contexts through the work of PLACE, a multidisciplinary not-for-profit architecture center in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The author, who worked with PLACE and contributed to the projects discussed here, contextualizes architecture centers and their relationship with sound before examining the specific case of sound and sound art in Northern Ireland and case studies of projects delivered by PLACE. Specifically, the article evaluates two sound installation artworks and three community engagement projects for young audiences. As a means of curating urbanism and architecture, sound-art-as-public-art affords useful strategies to examine, describe or critique the environment as alternatives to traditional architecture exhibition formats. Sound’s temporality and materiality allow sound art works to exist as temporary sculptural interventions in the urban sphere, with attendant implications for public art procurement and urban acoustics. Rich territories of engagement are opened when using sound in a community participatory context.

Making Ireland Modern

Making Ireland Modern is a cross-disciplinary, inter-institutional, inter-media design and research project which emerged from an open competition (won by Boyd and McLaughlin) to commission/curate the Irish pavilion for the Venice biennale 2014. It explores the relationship between architecture, infrastructure and technology in the building of a new nation. Constructed as a demountable, open matrix of drawings, photographs, models and other artefacts, the exhibition (12 x 5 x 6 metres) presents ten infrastructural episodes – Negation, Electricity, Health, Transportation, Television, Aviation, Education, Telecommunications, Motorways, Data – spanning a period of one hundred years from 1916-2016. Exploring a range of scales from the detail design of objects to entire landscapes and other territories, Making Ireland Modern describes architecture’s role in transforming the physical and cultural identity of the new state through its intersession in the everyday lives of its population. In 2015, we were commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland to expand and develop the pavilion for a three cities tour of Ireland as one of the five major strands of the Arts Council’s Art2016 programme of Irish State’s 1916-2016 centennial celebrations (2016).