My Favorite Building at the Venice Biennale Is Made Out of Sound

Walking into the Polish Pavilion, my heart, my body took on the vibrations. I walked from one side to the other, then from one end to the other, putting my ear to the walls like i was listening for a heartbeat. I looked up and giant vents had sound coming through them. There were waves bouncing up and down and all around me and suddenly they are made apparent. All of those sounds of my neighbors fucking, that Mexican salsa that drives by every morning at 7am, the horns from the trucks on the BQE behind my house, police helicopters, new construction, weekend sidewalk barbecues. Life was, I heard, sound.

Unlike most of the other pavilions in the global parade at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, the submission from Poland was an empty space. It was the shell of a hulking but otherwise nondescript building – it could have been any building – turned into a giant speaker. By leaving the building bare and planting microphones and sensors in the ceiling, walls, floor, curator Michal Libera and artist Katarzyna Krakowiak have built a place that generates, transmits, and transforms sounds, not just from within the building but from the surrounding architecture. The result is a space that overwhelms you with the physicality of sound. It’s called Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers, a phrase taken from Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son, and it deserved to win the award for honorable mention, which it did.

After Michal and Katarzyna met me at a nearby cafe for Aperol and soda, we went back to the Giardini and entered the building through a side door, walked through the Romanian pavilion and back into Poland. We were alone there and then a new pitter-patter sound broke the soft room tones. They looked at each other and someone said, “It’s raining.”

Motherboard: We’re at the biggest architecture show in the world. Why do you think so many people are so attracted to this big bare space?

Michal: Hopefully people like the fact that it’s almost organic. I don’t like this particular word, but on the other hand, I had the feeling that the room is just going on and on and on. Maybe that’s what they keep in mind, that there is something going on anyway, regardless if they are there or not. So they say okay, now the situation is this and in two hours it’s going to be different.

Katarzyna: This amplification is happening 24 hours a day and people can come in at night and listen to the walls. I’m afraid of using the word “organic”, so I am thinking this is something like “without skin.”

Michal: We were having one of these stupid late night conversations with the girls at the bar near where we were staying and one of them said okay, so what’s going to be there at your pavilion? And we said, nothing, it’s going to be empty – empty but full of meanings, and someone said no! there’s just one meaning, there’s nothing more. That there’s just one thing we want to show.

What would you say that one meaning is?

Michal: Listen. Just listen. And I think when you start to listen, you get into this mood, this awareness that there’s people around us. It’s one of the main issues of architecture, I would say. For me, that was the real experience of architecture. The biggest compliment I think we’ve gotten from the press here, this daily newspaper, our’s was picked as the most architectural. And I thought, wow, my god. I don’t even know when Corbusier was born but this is “the real architecture.”

Is this project more about feeling or aesthetics?

Michal: That’s a big question. For me, it’s absolutely not about aesthetics. I would say there are a lot of sounds that I really don’t like in this pavilion. But I said, okay they are here so let it be. For me it’s too rhythmical, the beats in the wall are too rhythmical. I don’t like it. But still, what can I do about it? They are just the wall sounds.

Katarzyna: I’m not focused on the eyes, I am really focused on finding a balance. For some reason people don’t know why they are staying longer. It is more about the perception. Why are they coming back? Why is this room taking on a different energy? The general look – this is something which is more important than the quality of sound for me.

Michal: In the beginning, we were considering putting in acoustic plaster and very expensive high-quality speakers which are designed to bring sound through the walls. We were not interested in sounds per se. We were more interested in that they were coming from the walls. That is what we were expecting from the exhibition.

I would say a very simple example is, when you listen to someone listening to music in the other room, of course the music is not perfect quality, but we were trying to get the point of listening through the walls and not listening to the perfect quality of music. So I don’t care if my mother is listening to Dire Straits in her flat. I really don’t give a shit about Dire Straits and I am more interested in the fact that she is there, listening to Dire Straits, and I get all these sounds of her movements and everything. So that was what we were thinking of more.

What kind of house would you want to live in?

Katarzyna: This is a very good question. For me, I don’t really think about the building when I think about the house.

Michal: Actually, I have to say I’ve enjoyed all the buildings I’ve lived in, in terms of sound. In this project, no one is aiming at any kind of perfection. We never ever had a single conversation about how the buildings should be designed. I think this is really the point. We are not going to give any recipe for building houses or something like this. But I think it’s more about being aware of what you’re doing. One of the things I really really love about staying in the flat where I live is waking up on Sunday morning and laying in my bed with my eyes closed and just listening to everybody all around, and I know it’s a little perverse because I know about these people a little too much – I know it. I know who snores, I know who’s beating the others. But still it gives me such a feeling of reality, that I really live with these people and we are not going farther in our contact because we don’t want to be friends, but still we share these lives, and wow. I don’t think I would be more comfortable in a flat that would be sound-proof. That would be really creepy.

Katarzyna: I’m living in a house on an island and it’s very windy. When it storms, all of my windows and my house move, so I’m very focused on the seismic effects and vibrations. All of the sounds on my building are very abstract.

Michal: As a kind of statement, I would say we humans are not against sound. There are these new electric cars which are made to be really silent and now they are bringing sound equipment to the cars just to have an audio marker that that sound is passing, because otherwise people would just be hit and killed by the cars. I think all of these rubbish noises we usually hate, I think we love them in a way. Also I think they are making some sense. They are giving some information.