Stillness, Solidity, Silence, & Intimacy

Rapid, vigorous, deafening, attention-grabbing, entertaining, and psychologically all-consuming. With the shock, speed, spectacle, and constant bombardment of culture expressed through social media, a lot of architecture is now designed to be an eye-catching novelty that competes for our attention. This is an era of architecture for Instagram and TikTok. Indeed, the sound of silence can be frightening when we are no longer accustomed to hearing our own breathing and heartbeat. Some people need silence and stillness to recharge, while others view it as an extreme punishment. It sometimes seems we have forgotten the pleasure of silence.

Silence isn’t just the absence of sound and clatter but a condition that stimulates our recollection and awakens our sensory awareness to the world around us – not a void, but a resplendent fullness of perceptual existence. For example, walking the narrow streets of Venice, Italy, with its absence of traffic noise, we become acutely aware of the sounds of footsteps, people’s voices, rhythmic water, and daily life. This allows us to consciously absorb our surroundings and turn inwards toward contemplation, either calming or insightful, which is transformative and empowering.

This is an unplugged architecture that allows us to listen to our inner being and feel protected and safe. It is human scale, layered, with subtle compositions. It does not offer the absence of sound but of visual noise, and even in a busy world, it includes places that offer stillness. An architecture of silence, stillness, solidity, and intimacy allows us to draw delight from what often goes unnoticed and what we might otherwise consider unimportant.

Silence, stillness, and relaxation also enable the unconscious mind to be free to wander and perform its important roles in the bottom-up processing of perception and emotion. In The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, British writer Olivia Laing explores how a range of New York City visual artists, including Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol, led emotionally solitary lives in a busy city, even when achieving fame, which helped enhance their creative output.

In his 2019 exhibition NEW CIRCADIA (Adventures in Mental Spelunking), American-Canadian architect and scholar Richard Sommer posed the following question: “Have our tech-infused lives caused us to forget the benefits and pleasures of losing ourselves in states of repose and reverie? What would happen if we disconnected from standard time and external stimuli within a dream-like space specifically designed for relaxation, reflection, and repose?”.

An enriched environment offers a more human scale and proximity, establishing a relationship between our mind, body, and the environment. An enriched environment can reflect the range of sounds around us and transmit them back to our bodies to be perceived and heard. Think of the warm tones that vibrate and resonate off wood compared to the cooler, emptier tones that reflect off glass.

In The World of Silence, Swiss philosopher Max Picard describes “the place where silence is listening,” which I interpret as the surroundings that communicate with us.

“When two people are conversing with one another … a third is always present: silence is listening. That is what gives breadth to a conversation: when the words are not moving merely within the narrow space occupied by the two speakers, but come from afar, from the place where silence is listening. That gives the words a new fullness. But not only that: the words are spoken as it were from the silence, from that third person, and the listener receives more than the speaker alone is able to give. Silence is the third speaker in such a conversation. At the end of the Platonic dialogues, it is always as though silence itself were speaking. The persons who were speaking seem to have become listeners to silence.

In enriching person-to-person relationships, qualities of solidity manifest themselves in mutual trust, respect, and verbal and nonverbal signs of support, often seen as the foundations of a sturdy relationship. In the built environment, solidity is one of the three founding principles of architecture as defined by Roman architect Vitruvius, who singled out the qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas, translated from Latin as solidity, usefulness, and an embodied “desire” for beauty. In the rapid, fleeting spectacle we find in today’s daily news cycles and on social media, the characteristic of solidity in architecture is an often-underrated quality in the places we live, work, learn, and heal.

Silence, stillness, solidity, and intimacy – these are the qualities that define the places where we want to enter, linger, and listen. Places that draw us in and make us feel at home and at peace. Places that we want to get to know versus those we want to pass through quickly. The tonalities of light and shadow and how light falls on a surface; the materials used and their surface depth, sheen, and reflectivity; the sound of a space and its shape and form – such qualities allow us to listen beyond our bodies and within our bodies, adding a sensation of stillness and intimacy to our experience of architecture.