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AN ABSTRACT WAY OF EXPERIENCING ARCHITECTURE
Fig.1: The sound is received into the space and informs the receipent.
To experience the absolute silence, John Cage entered into the anechoic chamber. He came out changed: it turned out that the experience of silence is not possible. Cage heard two sounds of different heights (...) generated by his body. The composer was delighted - no music will die while I’m alive.1 Sound is a must for every experience of space, that is why everyone is in constant dialogue with architecture - the human body constantly generates sounds that resound in a specific place, and then come back again thus shaping emotionally rich experiences of being inside architecture. The notion of silence, on the other hand, is usually equated with the conscious or experienced lack of specific sound-signals and a low-frequency background, and not with a physical lack of sounds (which cannot be experienced in nature).
In this context, the silence of architecture can be therefore equated with the death of the city in its semantic meaning city, which remains only in form of a pile of bricks overgrown with tall grass which slowly changes its status and returns to the nature together with its sounds: wind and rain. Therefore, it can be concluded that the presence of man is the only factor which determines the existence of both silence and sound in architecture, because he is the only one able to give them meaning, receive and generate them. Silence in architecture can therefore be understood as a strong will of internal meditation, stimulating the imagination to open itself to the attentive process of listening to spaces that contain music in crudo; the latent music waiting to be extracted by those who hear more.2 Martin Heidegger also claims that the practice of silence allows you to tame space, get to know it, identify it, name it, so understand and truly live.3 Architecture
