SOCKS

An online magazine of Art, Architecture, Media, Culture, Sounds, Territories, Technology)

  • Media
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Culture
  • Sounds
  • Territories
  • Visual Atlas

Bernhard Leitner’s Le Cylindre Sonore, 1987

January 21, 2012 by Fosco Lucarelli 2 Comments

Despite living in Paris since 2007 and regularly enjoying a walk in the Park de la Villette, we honestly never happened to find a little sound pavillion embedded in one of the thematic gardens of the park. Le Cylindre Sonore, a public art installation by Bernard Leitner, was realized in 1987 and is one of the few built architectural works by the Austrian architect and composer.

Active since the 60’s, Leitner’s work always focused on the relationships between sound and space, or better “sound as building material” as the title of one of his retrospective exhibitions.
Unlike architectural walls, sound is not an elementary medium for the definition of limits, and the separation of the interior from the exterior, yet is not a blurred, totally undefined entity, insofar it is able to create unseeable walls and define invisible spaces.

Partially hidden from the bamboos, Le Cylindre Sonore stands with his concrete double walls in a lower level respect of the bordering alleys, as an excavated hole voluntary delimiting the rest of the park. Once descended with a long staircase, one can experience a contemplative listening in a true resonating chamber, potentiated by three loudspeakers hidden behind eight perforated concrete walls. Water rivets increase the detail and help separating this place from the sides.

Through subtly orchestrated reverberations, high pitched or filled sounds, spaces are constantly recreated. Soft pricklings in a dialogue with the robustness of concrete walls.

Images courtesy Bernhard Leitner and Archdaily.


Related Posts

  • Bernhard Leitner's Soundcube, 1969

    Many years before the Cylindre Sonore, (see previous post), in 1969, Leitner began his research…

  • Yannis Xenakis' Polytopes: Cosmogonies in Sound and Architecture

        Fusing the ancient greek terms "poly" (“many”) and "topos" (“place”), Greek-French composer Iannis…

  • Nike Air Pompidou

    Non capita tutti i giorni che un paio di scarpe, benché rivoluzionario, nasca per ispirazione…

  • dOCUMENTA 13: News From Nowhere, by Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, [a Retrospective from the Future]

    News from Nowhere is probably the most ambitious art-project of Kassel's dOCUMENTA 13. Presented in…

  • Katzenklavier (Cat Organ)

    Thanks (indirectly) to Matteo Pasquinelli, I discovered the Katzenclavier. A "Cat Organ" is a fictive…

Comments

  1. Stéphane says

    January 21, 2012 at 12:49 pm

    Very nice project. It is located at one end of the Jardin des bambous by Alexandre Chemetoff. Not very far, at the entrance of the Cité des sciences, you can find another sound installation, “Le Mur d’Alice”, an actual wall of sound by Luc Martinez.

Trackbacks

  1. Bernhard Leitner’s Soundcube, 1969 : socks-studio says:
    January 21, 2012 at 12:17 pm

    […] years before the Cylindre Sonore, (see previous post), in 1969, Leitner began his research on sound defined space. A room composed of 64 loudspeakers, […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr

Socks is a non-linear journey through distant territories of human imagination.

About | Visual Atlas | Topics

We are Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli from Microcities. Ask us anything

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr


SOCKS is a project by Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi of MICROCITIES, Architecture Cityscape, Landscape.
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Whenever possible we try to attribute content (images, videos, and quotes) to their creators and original sources. Please feel free to write us if you notice misattributions or wish something to be removed.
SOCKS is powered by WordPress.