Radio Blablablarchitecture is talking building. To design is to talk and to talk is to design. Yet the history of architecture has failed to recognised the value of speech as a legitimate means of architectural representation. The podcast ‘sketch’ below was made in-house by the team at WHAT_architecture for the Arts Council’s Modulations series on Resonance FM (104.4FM). The podcast is a little unpolshed: the humour a bit clunky, the attitude DIY punky. Yet the podcast attempts to capture ‘in sound’ the spirit of Radio Blablablarchitecture. In order to talk architecture one must learn the language. So we will evidence the peculiarity of architects talking, in interviews, archi-lectures, conversations, as client presentations. Radio Blablablarchitecture will demonstrate that talking, and the literal sounding of architecture, has much to offer in comparison to the more recognised mediums of architectural expression: drawing, writing and building! Know what I am saying?

Radio blablablarchitecture is talking buildings. In this show, we listen and talk about the idea of a building as an instrument. There’s an invisible architecture, a sonically perceived space that is not necessarily dependent on the visual stimuli. In that sense, sound design is not just about matching the supposed acoustic characteristics of a visual space, but also a way of altering the narrative and emotional aspects of a story by actually altering the space itself in terms of a character, a circumstance, a specific event or a certain sense of place. In that way of resolving the subjective-objective and diegetic-non diegetic dynamics, there’s in fact so much creative possibilities, an architectural process of sound available. It is not just about accompanying the visual, but establishing alterations and new perceptions of the spatial dimension, getting into a virtual sonic architecture, an imaginative conception of space that is not just physical in terms of the context, but audible, perceptual; aiming to be open to different notions of the space itself either acoustic or acousmatic and actually creating a space between both conceptions in order to develop a game between fidelity towards the visual, causal or narrative, and the expansion of those elements itself by adding its own characteristics, as a way of altering the landscape from the soundscape.

Radio Blablablarchitecture is talking buildings. In this show, we listen to buildings. ‘Blindfold Critique’ is a new way of ‘looking’ at architecture. Or rather not looking at architecture. This architecture disengaged from the visual field and reconsidered in the aural. The architect (you, me, critic, man in the street…) is blindfolded and taken to a space where they are asked to give their response as they are led along an sonic architectural promenade. These soundings have been recorded and edited by Joshua David Lynch and are presented here as audio files (and best listened to through headphones). Blindfold Critiques where done as part of the 2013 Sydney Architecture Festival and were presented as part of the Expanded Architecture at The Rocks Exhibition.