Interiors in-between Nature and Artifice - Space and Sound

Paul Valéry, in his pamphlet Eupalinos or the architect (1923), speaks of a visual musicality of the building, in which structural, decorative elements and the entire skyline dictate the rhythm of the building score. In fact, talking with Socrates, Phaedrus refers to the question posed to him by the architect Eupalino: "Tell me, since you are so sensitive to the effects of architecture, have you not observed, walking around the city, that among the Buildings that people it, there are some that are mute, others speak, and others, finally, and they are the most rare, sing? “. If the Greeks had recognized proportions in music and mathematical relationships which they then transferred to architecture, for the same reasons, in the Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti recommended architects to study music. In nineteenth-century Germany, Göethe argued that “Music is architecture carried out, while architecture is petrified music”. On the perceptual level, analogies between music and architecture are due to the synesthetic propensity of the human mind. Even in language, synesthesia is often used, for example we speak of "musical architecture" for a piece or "spatial rhythms" for an architecture. the essay, after a diachronic introduction, explores the relationship between sound and architecture by identifying four main categories: sound devices, nature's amplifiers, sounding Buildings and sound installations investigating, through the exemplification of case studies, different design approaches to the thematic.