Sound in silence: design and listening cultures in the Woodberry Poetry Room

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which architecture and design forged a place for sound reproduction technologies inside the silent sanctuary of the modern library. During the first half of the twentieth century, recorded theatrical plays, interviews and readings entered the collections of public and private libraries, forcing universities to reckon with acoustic modalities of knowledge production and circulation. Focussing on the Woodberry Poetry Room, a small room designed by Aino and Alvar Aalto inside Harvard University’s Lamont Library, the article discusses how the two architects and designers addressed the acoustic challenge that record players presented to spaces of learning.Although an oddity in Aino and Alvar Aalto’s oeuvre, the Poetry Room holds a central position in the history of acoustic modernisms in architecture. Inside the room the two architects articulated their modernist critique of functionalism and technology, reclaiming listening spaces as the subject matter of design. In transforming each record player into a listening station in the middle of the room, their design turned the gramophone into a pillar of modern poetry. This interior marked a new sonic sensibility in architectural practices and discourses, indicative of the place that sound reproduction technologies, such as gramophones and record players, held in modern architecture as iconic objects of modernity and mass culture. The interior was also the meeting point for a new generation of poets, who gathered around those record players, plugged in, and listened together, yet alone, to the voices of modern poetries. In the 1960s, these same poets took over the New York scene, forcefully transforming the live performance of poetry. The article argues that architecture ultimately shaped the social space of reading and listening to poetry, and thus played an important role in producing new encounters between objects and human subjects, readers and sound reproduction technologies.