Debating volume: architectural versus electrical amplification in the League of Nations, 1926–28

Abstract

In the debates following the 1926–27 competition for the new headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva, conflicting contemporary ideas about architecture were manifested in approaches to sound. The competition coincided with the formation of architectural acoustics as a profession and academic discipline. Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer, together with their acoustic adviser, for example, employed electrical technologies such as loudspeakers as integral parts in what they called scientific architecture. Other projects, prominently that of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, denied the feasibility of electro-acoustic amplification, arguing that the intelligibility of speech had to be granted by the geometric form of the Assembly Hall’s architecture.Throughout the process, the competition brief’s outline of having nearly 3,000 seats was criticised for being acoustically unfeasible. Considering the state of contemporary loud-speaker technology, this scale of an auditorium seemed incompatible with the aim of literal, acoustic understanding of speeches in the League of Nations’ Assembly Hall. As in a Tower of Babel, diplomatic understanding was thus not only a political but also a technical problem. Later on, this genuine problem provoked Richard Neutra’s statement that such meetings were altogether unnecessary.The debates foregrounded the expertise of acousticians such as Franz Max Osswald, the founder of Switzerland’s first laboratory of applied acoustics at ETH, and Gustave Lyon in Paris, who stood for architectural amplification by sound reflections. There was no consensus on employing architectural or electrical techniques to ensure intelligibility of speech, and the acoustic debate was couched in rhetoric which either downplayed or exaggerated the coming of age of electro-acoustic amplification. Studying the ideological and technological trajectories of the 1920s, different approaches to architectural acoustics shed new light on the reasoning of modernism’s champion Sigfried Giedion, and others. The heated debates following the competition gave remarkable prominence to arguments about acoustics.