vinyl record architecture

0.

Nothing comes from out of nowhere. One can only conceive and make buildings based on the buildings one knows. In some cases, it appears that knowing lots of buildings should offer us a vast repertoire of options to think of new ones. But is that always the case? Actually, the amount of buildings one knows about does not necessarily imply that the quality of said knowledge is operative, meaning that one can actually do something with it. Thoughts like these have taken me to a distant, pre-architectural past, where I’ve found some clues to deal with the quantity and quality of architectural knowledge, and how we deal with it.

1.

Growing up in pre-internet times, I spent most of my allowance money buying LP records - a slow and steady process, where each record was worth a couple weeks’ savings. Since local radio stations didn’t play the kind of music I liked, and there were no media dedicated to it either, knowledge about bands and albums mostly came from friends’ older siblings who brought records back from their travels every now and then. In their homes I’d hear something I liked, took (mental) note, and once I’d saved enough I’d go out and look for it.

Not much was on offer, really. Only a few albums were published by the two or three local companies that licensed foreign music for the local market. Vinyl records were notably thinner than those brought from abroad, covers were cheaply printed, and instead of inner paper sleeves with lyrics and art we got a cheap plastic bag to protect each record. I still remember making plans to buy albums from the Columbia Records catalog by post mail; putting together lists of albums I’d never actually heard, but suspected to be wonderful. But reality always came down to saving a couple weeks’ allowances, and slowly but steadily building up a small collection based on a narrow offer.

With time, these circumstances - slowness and steadiness amid limitation - started revealing their benefits. The fact that the process went the way it did meant that I had lots of time and attention to devote to each album. On the one hand, it allowed the music to somehow ‘breathe’ into me, like a wine’s taste evolves after the bottle has been open for some time. I have really vivid memories of the two or three times I arrived home full of curiosity, played the record I’d just bought, and hated it. But having basically no alternative I played it again, and then once more, until I slowly discovered that it was actually wonderful.

On the other hand, having to choose among very few available options, and then dedicating two or three weeks to listen to a single record closely before I could buy another, allowed me to really pay attention to details and thus ‘learn’ the record in its entirety. As I played an album over and over again I learned the names of the songs, took a close look at the artwork on the cover, and sometimes even studied the few details printed on the dingy local covers. By the time I had saved enough for my new purchase I would know the last record ‘back and forth,’ so to speak. I knew, for instance, exactly which song would follow the current one, as well as most of the lyrics by heart. Sometimes I even remembered bandmember’s names, producers, publishers, etc.

Finally, given the way I got my albums, I felt the need to take excellent care of them. I had actually given up on other important things to buy them, and they were certainly scarce, so I spent almost as much time maintaining them as I did playing them. Among many other things, I’d rub them them with ice-cubes, wiped them with a special cloth, learned to manipulate them without ever putting my fingers on the grooves, kept them away from direct sunlight.

2.

Since you couldn’t play LP records everywhere - turntables are large and fragile - for ‘portability’ one had to pass the music to another format: cassette tapes. Sometimes I’d pass whole albums directly to tape, sometimes I made selections to play in the car, parties, and so on. This selection process was also very useful, since it allowed me to ‘relate’ music that made sense together, sometimes obviously, sometimes in ways that were less easy to discern, and still I could understand.

Intensive listening and the sort of analysis that allows one to extract music from several albums and put it together in an original compilation ended up giving me a sense of how certain music ‘felt’ together. This became useful later on, when I was invited to take care of the music in a friend’s bar. It was great to know albums so well that I knew exactly where each song was placed in an album (e.g., track 4, side B), how it sounded, and how it could combine with two other songs (the one currently playing, the one that should follow) to achieve some sense of continuity, with an intention. By this I mean that I knew many songs well enough to be able to keep a party running for a whole night. Most importantly, though, I was somehow able to manage a small crowd’s mood, simply based on how I chose to play different songs in a particular order.

As I said, albums and cassette tapes came in different qualities. From the poorly printed local LPs to gorgeous American or English vinyl: heavy, thick, wrapped in luxury printed paper sleeves, inside sturdy and shiny cardboard covers, elegantly wrapped in thin protective plastic; from simple, ordinary sixty-minute tapes, to weighty metal-based cassettes, able to capture and play music with extraordinary accuracy. I learned to recognize these differences, and use my hardware (turntables, decks) and software (records and tapes) accordingly.

3.

The years that followed my early teens saw many attempts to supersede vinyl records. Gladly I never followed advice to get rid of my LPs. Cassette tapes basically disappeared, DATs never really made it, CDs took over for some time, and then came the internet, first with Napster, until the legal framework caught up with tech and now we have Spotify, iTunes, et al. A miracle!

In case it’s not evident, this apparently non-architectural recollection follows up on my previous post, and also springs from the colleague’s comment in a seminar I mentioned there. As much as he talked about the differences that exist between printed magazines and a platform like ArchDaily, he also talked about the way we get our music nowadays. On the one hand, we’re faced with nearly infinite yet somehow ungraspable possibilities; on the other we keep the ability to know a couple of things really well.

As he put it (I don’t use Spotify myself, but rather hold on to my vinyl and CDs), in digital streaming songs chain each other based on an algorithm that identifies preferences and taps into a nearly-infinite repository. One can listen to amazing music one will surely love non-stop and forever; hardly ever repeat any song, discover tunes and artists one would definitely not come across otherwise. But given the rather effortless way in which this happens it might be the case that one doesn’t ever get to know the name of any song or who plays it, if it’s part of an album, and so on. Music plays, it’s always amazing, but it can always ‘pass through’ us without leaving too much of an imprint.

The contrary - what I just described using my own experience with LP records - is quite different, and allows me to come to the basic question of this post. How does this same technological development, from limited physical to infinite digital resources, reflect on our work as architects, especially regarding the way we choose to know? Like songs, buildings also became available to me in a pre-internet era, meaning step by step, slowly but steadily. The few of them that stuck to my mind did so strongly. Books and magazines take time to read, there weren’t really too many of them readily available to me, and they’ve always been quite expensive too. And now we have ArchDaily.

Against this conundrum, the wonderful Observations and Reflections feed suggests that a slow and steady learning process is always possible, even in the face of current technology. In said account, different buildings are observed (photographed) piecemeal, and then sketched, drawn technically, etc. Surely, there must be many other architects doing such excellent work. In any case, the time it has evidently taken someone to represent each building manifold means it has been allowed to ‘breathe’ and then ‘sink in,’ like songs in an album played non-stop for at least a couple of weeks. Surely, whoever has taken the time to pass each building through different representations should get to understand them well. Well enough - I can safely bet a couple of weeks of my teenager allowance on this! - to be able to ‘combine’ them based on their nature and properties - bar DJ, again.

A particular attitude seems necessary to deal with the different modalities of learning that are presented to us nowadays; one which somehow allows us to benefit from the vastness and diversity of the knowledge that has become available (a miracle!), without losing the discipline, the patience, and the intellectual humbleness required to recognize the advantages that come from being limited. We can only know so many things, and we only have so much time - that’s for sure - and thus we must inevitably make choices. So, is it better to constantly enjoy new and different things, albeit rather ephemerally? Or, should we rather limit our experience to a few things which we can get to know in depth? Hopefully - at least that’s what I’m trying to propose in this, as much as in my previous post - there should be a way to do both.

Image: ‘Groove and needle in close embrace from beginning to end,’ featuring a Technics SL-1200 turntable with SME model 3009 series II improved pick-up arm and Shure V-15 type III Stereo Dynetic Phonograph Cartridge. Wikimedia commons