Swiss italian Radio RTSI-Retedue (Channel II). 5-6 december 2007

Enrico Bianda interviews Lorenzo Brusci on the following themes:
- Acoustic design can provide dynamic contents and expressive architecture changeable perspectives to the human habitat of the Schindler’ factory new contemporary art museum, project by Claudio Nardi e Leonardo Proli. Civil, aesthetic and functional meanings through a symbolic acoustic design.

- The relationship between Brusci’s work and historical cultural sources and items, territories, cities and communities, from the architectural and the sound point of view.

- The artist: towards a (self)reflecting responsability.

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“Excerpts from the interview plus written extended reflections concerning the relation between intentionality and functionality in contemporary city life”.

Walking in the street, willing to obtain and achieve a specific strategic and geographic aim. Surrounded by noise aggression, media noise aggression and a-systematic exposures. Carnival of colours, shapes, redundancies. Aggression. Reaction? Functional actions become rigid and “closed” once combined and exposed to intensive uncontrolled urban media noise; the civil society vanishes into the citizen-tourist city fruition model; you skip facing the external world with your private and complex emotional set, better an organized functional set of goals. Richard Ingersoll in his sociology of architecture book Sprawl Town (published in Italy by Melteni) talks positively about the possible integration between commercial malls and public architecture, new contexts able to reconstruct a social texture setting up the social dynamic of a traditional market area, getting over the post-industrial sublimation of passive-active-passive consuming actions inside the ’segregated dedicated space’. Once again the combination between functions and ‘closed environments’ - also considerable ‘contemporary complexity reducer factors’ - simplify obtaining one’s goal, lowering and often annihilating the incidence of the richer social and wider cultural landscape.

Sonic bamboo door to Campi Bisenzio. URBAN SONIC GARDEN 2004/2005. Urban sonic and horticultural installation by Giardino Sonoro.

(photos by Davide Virdis)

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Our urban experience design aims to restructure individuals’ aspiration to a full functional city, designing new perceptual doors to the pleasure of community life, made of surprises and unpredictable encounters, time stretching and potential lives at every corner and sight. Filling city paths with stimulating media contents, information and narrations; street signals able to underline and offer further understanding keywords and stunning interpretation stances: these tools can enhance and increase the intensity of the communitarian experience, specially through the unavoidable arisen critics and supports. Between you and ‘the intended place’ there are other places, other stories, stratified suggestions and heritages, persons, not simulacrum of presences (and of their inter-relationships). Persons with their sharable attitudes and goals. Before approaching your target -the event, the place, the building or an advised danger- there’s the possibility to live alternative experiences, to let them talk, sending and receiving environmental messages, walking unpredictable paths, enriching your daily/night cultural landscape.

Giardino Sonoro Lab, Firenze, 2007. Photo by Daniele Barbagli.

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Iconography of presences, choreography of motions, they should suggest behaviors and narrations able to discover unknown urban sites, attitude to places and institutions never considered before, overcoming the caption like reference of standard street and information signals: to be aware of which soundscape you are immersed in, which historical traces you are belonging to or heading to, to be emotionally and chronologically connected to contemporary events happening in other towns of the planet… All inside a clear context of wide sense of welcoming and care:

ie. the sonorous and luminous traffic light (Brusci, 2007) is a clear example of this approach. Consider a traffic light that is also a “pedestrian waiting lit spot” (where the pedestrian is always at sight), with a street noise masking interactive sound system, a real shelter from the sun and the rain, equipped with a synchronized sound design announcing the pure functions of the traffic light itself: waiting ->crossing, quality and security of the action. Unfortunately cars and their drivers belong to the “pure function” domain: purpose, action, result. We need to restructure the attitude to passively assume the immanency of accidents and risks as the only real point of contact with “other’s reality”, the outside: inside a car you live a cognitive alienation, surrounded by noise and wide frequency range music (highly compressed radio music). We need helping drivers to consider that real persons are walking by, that they belong to the same ethic action-domain, “pedestrians are a sameness with drivers; cars are provisional interfaces”. This can sound simple, “not sufficiently stigmatizing” but in terms of experience design we want clearly to communicate ‘in the streets’, with all the means, that “people are real people and nothing can justify a “contact-accident” epiphany. This is one of our fundamental issues concerning contemporary cities: street events are not media events. Media contents on the contrary have to help enhancing living circumstances and bringing them to a strong continuous cultural negotiation.”

A study for a city sonorous and luminous traffic light. Designed by Lorenzo Brusci. Collaborator Pietro Fantoni, 2007.

We are now approaching furthur designing steps with arch. Pino Brugellis