Issue 13
DATE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
12
PEOPLE
10.21.2024
Sounding Out a Better Way to Build
by Jesse Dorris
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
10.07.2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
09.23.2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
09.09.2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
08.26.2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
08.19.2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
08.12.2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
08.05.2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
07.29.2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
07.22.2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
07.15.2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
06.24.2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
06.17.2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
06.03.2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
05.28.2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
05.13.2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
05.06.2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
04.29.2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
04.22.2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
04.08.2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
04.01.2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
03.25.2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
03.11.2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
03.04.2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
02.26.2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.19.2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.12.2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
02.05.2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
01.22.2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
01.16.2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
01.08.2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
12.18.2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
12.11.2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
12.04.2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
11.27.2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
11.06.2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
10.30.2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
10.23.2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
10.16.2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
10.09.2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
10.02.2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
09.24.2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
09.18.2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
09.11.2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
09.05.2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
08.28.2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
08.21.2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
08.14.2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
08.07.2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
07.31.2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
07.24.2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
07.17.2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
07.10.2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
06.26.2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
06.19.2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
06.12.2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
06.05.2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
05.30.2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
05.21.2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
05.08.2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
05.01.2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
04.24.2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
04.17.2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
04.10.2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
04.03.2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
03.27.2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
03.20.2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
03.13.2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
03.06.2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.07.2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
02.20.2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
02.13.2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
02.07.2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
02.13.2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
02.27.2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
02.07.2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
02.07.2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
02.07.2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
PEOPLE
10.21.2024
Sounding Out a Better Way to Build

Mikyoung Kim wants architects to start listening to landscapes.

Two women walking through grassy hills of the Chicago Botanic Garden Learning Campus
The Chicago Botanic Garden Learning Campus. (Courtesy Mikyoung Kim Design)


One afternoon, when Mikyoung Kim was a teenager, she sat on the bench before her piano. Her architect father and ceramicist mother, both recent immigrants to America from South Korea, had taken out a loan to purchase the instrument when she was 5, and she’d practiced intensely every day since.

Her body became a right angle enfolding the form of the piano, her fingers forming more angles across its keys. Kim looked at the score, the black-and-white blueprint of dots and lines she could turn into sound. In fact, she heard what she saw. She closed her eyes and began to play. Her piano teacher told her to play it lighter: Play it as if you’re walking across a winter field, with a very light crust on top of the snow.

The sound of Kim remembering this moment fills the Boston conference room of her namesake landscape architecture firm, which she founded in 1994 and which has since gathered a crescendo of award-winning projects around the world, from South Korea to Detroit to down the block from her office, all these decades later. For Kim, it was a moment in which an imagined landscape became a manifestation of the connection between sight, sound, and emotion, a bridge she could create. She was a gifted player, who followed high school with acceptance into the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Plans of further development collapsed when she developed tendinitis in her left arm. “It was so traumatic,” she says, her tone still wincing. Even the lightest walk across the snow’s crust was too much to bear.

So Kim turned to sculpture, then to landscape architecture, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and to public art, at MIT. But she couldn’t get sound out of her head. “It was shocking to me how visually oriented landscape architects and designers are,” she says. “When we think about noise, we think of loud noises affecting the structural component of your ear—of losing your hearing. But it’s a much deeper thing. My journey was to understand how sound actually affects us. It should be an important part of how we design anything.”

Kim sees noise as a vital yet under-explored subject that, thanks to technological innovation, is constantly changing, impacting our spaces and our selves. Although the connections between human and environmental health have been clearly demonstrated, they are rarely prioritized by architects in the design process. By developing work, research, and tools that address all things aural as it pertains to building—funded in part by grants from the Landscape Architecture Foundation—Kim broadcasts a call to action: Architects need to start thinking about how spaces sound.

Portrait of architect Mikyoung Kim in a field by the ocean
Mikyoung Kim. (Courtesy Mikyoung Kim Design)


It’s worth remembering why we hear. “Our sense of hearing evolved to keep track of things that our eyes are not pointed at,” says Carl Giegold, a partner at Threshold Acoustics who has contributed to the Veterans Administration’s guidelines for healing environments. “Typically, an urban environment, like a streetscape, is ‘safe’ as defined by our sense of sight. But it’s incredibly dangerous from the standpoint of our sense of hearing, because the din of the city masks those little events that our brains are programmed to seek out.” Walking down a hallway or park path that’s designed with only visual aesthetics in mind might in fact be a stressful cacophony as our ears struggle to sort through the noise.

What we hear has real health costs: Researchers at the nearby Massachusetts General Hospital and Mass General have found links between transportation noise and the stress pathways that increase the risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Ongoing exposure to urban din in Europe has been linked to 50,000 new cases of heart disease annually; the European Environmental Agency has ruled that only air pollution is a greater environmental danger to public health.

And how much we hear matters, too. At the American Society of Landscape Architects’ recent Conference on Landscape Architecture, Giegold presented “Sound and the City,” a session about the impacts of urban noise pollution on health, with members of Kim’s team, and how to implement “sound-conscious design in neuro-inclusive landscape architecture.”

“We’ve found that noise pollution impairs our health and well-being both neurologically and physiologically,” says Henry Lyon, a former director at Kim’s firm, which has spent decades researching and collaborating with neurodiversity experts and designers. “Hypersensitivity to sound is common to many psychological conditions, including autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, PTSD, anxiety, and depression.”

As the global population increasingly urbanizes, the threat of noise pollution grows. “It’s profoundly unhealthy, profounding stressful,” Giegold says of the sounds. “It’s a failing of architecture to live exclusively in the visual realm, in the composition for the eye, without thinking of what it’s doing to the whole human.”

Woman and child sitting inside custom furniture at Boston Children’s Hospital
Custom furniture at Boston Children’s Hospital. (Photo: Robert Benson. Courtesy Mikyoung Kim Design)


“There’s something about listening that’s so bodily,” says Shannon R. Stratton, who, as the former chief curator at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, installed exhibitions, including “Atmosphere for Enjoyment: Harry Bertoia’s Environment for Sound” and “Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound,” that explored how the auditory and the visual can make meaning in architecture. Whether visitors played or listened to the works on view, she was surprised at the effect: people slowed down and let their bodies linger. They listened longer than the average visitor looked. “Maybe listening activates a patience that looking doesn’t, anymore,” Stratton says. Sound, when deployed attractively, can itself become an attraction.

Kim is similarly rethinking the aural experience for people in a different realm: health care. There, as with most of her work, she isn’t just interested in reducing the negative effects of sound, but in harnessing its positive aspects, too. In 2018, she completed the first movement of what’s become an ongoing symphony of environmentally sensitive master planning at Boston Children’s Hospital: a redesigned entry with generous streetscapes and warm, wood furniture curving like welcoming hands; interstitial spaces with waves of walls that create quiet nooks to chat, think, or rest; and a crucial quartet of “healing gardens” that not only dampen the clamor of the city and hospital, but create distinct sonic surroundings that aid in recovery.

“You don’t go to a children’s hospital just for a shot,” Kim says. “It’s often the worst day of your life.” Patients told her of entering the complex and not being able to leave for years. “The first thing they always talked about was getting rid of the sounds of their room, that beep-beep-beep that notifies caregivers that something is happening. They want a sonic oasis. And they want to see the sky.”

Any rooftop garden worth its soil will accomplish the latter. But Kim wanted to make the gardens places patients will not just escape to, but escape in, which required more than silence. “Most acoustic engineers are focussed on mitigation,” she says. So was she, particularly in designing the hospital’s End of Life Garden, which offers areas blanketed by layers of different plants and simple furnishings that can be cloistered off and reserved for families. “You’re really protected, sonically,” she says, at a moment when you might need it most.

Two young boys standing at the Cheonggye River Source Point in Seoul, South Korea
The Cheonggye River Source Point in Seoul, South Korea. (Courtesy Mikyoung Kim Design)


When designers begin on a project, they typically conduct studies on shade, soil, and wind—but rarely on sound. With Giegold, Kim is creating an assessment tool kit to change that. It involves using AudioMoth, an inexpensive open-source acoustic monitoring device, to determine what kind of noise is present, followed up by onsite recordings made by Decibel, a sound-level meter app.

The results identify how much sound is in need of mitigation, like street and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing hubbub, and when and where on the site they’re most prominent. “Master planning and zoning regulations could require [things like] soft materials on façades, or green walls and façade geometries that push sound up and out of the way,” Giegold says.

They’re also assembling small-scale, long-term ways to reduce unwanted noise, such as specifying certain materials and products, and recommendations for site planning and maintenance: Fescue and clover mixes could replace traditional lawns, for instance, and only need to be mowed two times a year; electric leaf blowers could be used in lieu of gas-powered landscaping equipment. Meanwhile, the team identifies practical ways to introduce sounds they want to encourage, including birds, breeze, and the babbling of rivers. “A roof cap can be a little sound sculpture,” Giegold says. “It can be that simple.” And that profound.

In effect, Kim and her team are seeking new industry standards, where firms will use the tool kit in their own designs. The value of having those tools echoes through her firm’s projects, regardless of their scale. Consider the 37-acre public TMC Helix Park in Houston, which sets more than 650 trees and heat-reflecting pathways that twist like DNA around a medical center and above a floodplain near the Brays Bayou. Built from the ground up, the park incorporates multiple typologies of sound, all related to the water that defines the region. At the entrance, the benches—made of wood, for maximum sound resonance—ring around one of the waterfalls that feed the park’s river, which is itself a sound source, its murmur manipulated like a bow on a string by the texture of the riverbed. Kim spent months CNC-routing models to determine the proper thickness.

This is not the first time she’s dealt with rivers: In 2007, she completed a pedestrian plaza along the Cheonggye River in central Seoul, situated below street level, in part, because of stormwater management. But “sonically,” Kim says, “it protects you from the streets.”

Compositions like these seek to harmonize acoustic considerations with visual and structural ones. They value natural sound as much as natural light. For Kim, it could be a park in the middle of the city that offers auditory paths as well as architectural ones—and that understands how the two might become one, as canopies of trees announce the forming of a new space with their dappling of light and rustling in the wind. Or it could be a garden for a kid who can’t leave the hospital, but whose well-being deserves the pleasures of birdsong, rippling water, perhaps even the crackle of a foot dancing across the ice. “We’re trying to think,” Kim says, her voice softening, “about the music of landscape.”