Acoustics, broadly, is the science of sound. Some would argue that the term applies solely to the physical properties of sound, but there are many fields within the discipline that focus not on the sound itself, but how it can be perceived, shaped, and applied.
Sub-disciplines such as electroacoustics (the study of electrical applications of sound, such as recording, processing, and reproduction) and architectural acoustics (the focus of this article) inform not only our understanding of how sound works, but also play a key part in shaping the role sound plays in our daily lives. Both have design methodologies every part as rich and nuanced as their sister fields industrial design, interior design, and architecture.
An Inseparable Art
While there are many resources available describing how sound works in rooms, these sources rarely discuss the role acoustics play in the places we live and work.
Architectural acoustics is inseparable from architecture, in that every building has its own unique acoustical profile, hence why many architectural descriptors have a sonic connotation, such as “airy” or “intimate.” Regardless of whether or not a building is designed for sound, its acoustics are shaped by its external environment, intended use, and the architect or builder’s choice of materials, technology, geometry, interior design, and construction.
Most of us understand and expect how sound works in rooms without ever cracking a book on the subject. We know by empirical observation that rooms with many hard surfaces such as stone or wood are much more reverberant (”echoey”) than rooms filled with carpets and heavy drapes. Similarly, we know that a large room with high ceilings is more likely to be reverberant than a small room with low ceilings, and that an empty house is more likely to be reverberant than a house filled with furniture and people.
Public Domain.
This empirical knowledge was the basis of designing for sound from the Greek and Roman amphitheaters up until the late 19th-century. Performance spaces were a result of architectural trial-and-error – successful spaces were imitated or improved, and the unsuccessful spaces often lost to history. Many are surprised that some of the world’s most beloved concert halls and opera houses, such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam or Milan’s Teatro alla Scala were constructed before the field of acoustics itself. However, outside of sacred or performance spaces, sound played a minor role in architectural design until the field of architectural acoustics was established by the Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine.
(Sabine was also cute as hell, let’s be real here.)
While trying to solve the acoustical problems of the Fogg Museum lecture hall at Harvard, Sabine discovered a relationship between a space’s volume, the surface areas of the room’s different materials, and how long it took for sounds (of a certain frequency) to fade away within the room (reverberation time). He devised a mathematical equation to explain this relationship. In doing this, Sabine not only quantified the degree to which certain materials absorb certain frequencies, he devised a scientific method that could be used to anticipate certain acoustical qualities of a room prior to its construction. (He later used this knowledge to design Boston Symphony Hall, which is a total banger.)
However, even with today’s technological advancements, architectural acoustics still relies, to some extent, on historical success, trial-and-error, and a pinch of design magic. It’s one of those rare fields that is equally an art and a science.
The Acoustics of Everyday Rooms
It’s not just noise problems that make up our everyday acoustical environments, it’s our architecture, too. During the time when industrialization first made homebuilding affordable for more and more people, common houses had a markedly different sonic profile than they do today, by means of architectural, furnishing and material choices.Socioeconomic factors also played an ancillary role in everyday architectural acoustics, as changes in family makeup and economy drastically shaped the sizes and shapes of everyday housing.
Four Houses
The soundscape of the everyday single family house has changed radically since the time mass housing became common after the growth of the railroad. As plans evolved, so, too, did their sonic qualities. These houses, from 1893, 1915, 1936, and 1963, exemplify how changes in technology, economy, and architecture bring with them changes in the architectural acoustics of our lives.
1893
This Queen Anne plan from 1893 is typical of the period. At this time, neither the indoor bathroom nor electricity were affordable or widespread.Furnaces were becoming more common, but were considered to be upgrades rather than established features in middle income homes such as this one, which was heated by fireplaces and wood-burning stoves.
As we are well aware, privacy and prudence were very important to 19th century society. This is reflected in the home’s closed floor plan, which takes great lengths to separate “public” (e.g. formal parlors & dining rooms) and private (e.g. kitchen, storage, bedrooms) spaces:
The home’s ceilings were 9 feet 6 inches on the first floor, shrinking down to 8 feet on the second floor. The floors were most likely wood, and the walls, plaster. The rooms are modestly sized - the largest room being the parlor, which is 14x14 feet wide.
Acoustically, the home was likely very quiet. These types of homes were commonly built outside the city limits in early suburbs connected either by rail or by streetcar, which made them less susceptible to environmental noise than their urban counterparts, despite the large number of windows. Additionally, because the home lacked electricity, plumbing, or a furnace, internal noise levels were likely low as well.
Despite the home’s tall ceilings and reflective surfaces, the rooms, with the exception of the hallways, probably weren’t very reverberant due to 19th century interiors being heavily upholstered and densely furnished, as explained in great detail by this 1887 promotional handbook on furnishing. Interestingly, the guide insists on “noiseless” carpets for the hall and stairs, which suggests that some design decisions in the 19th century home were acoustically-minded.
My apologies for the late post - my faithful laptop of 5 years died on Saturday, and I have been in IT Hell (someone make that a blog pls) getting my files off of my hard drive, in the meantime learning a valuable lesson about keeping things in the cloud. Anyway, I hope you like words, because that’s what this article mostly is.
I receive emails all the time about McMansions built in countries outside the USA. I’m here this week to briefly examine where and why McMansions are commonly constructed (and why the US has the vast majority of the world’s gross houses.) For the next five Sunday posts, I will be doing a special on the houses of each of these countries:
Canada
Australia
Isolated, yet entertaining cases to be covered in the coming weeks:
Ireland (specifically during the housing bubble, less-so now)
China
Eastern European ex-Soviet countries
Now, as those of you who are also obsessed with @uglybelgianhouses may know, ugly houses transcend geography. However, not all ugly houses are McMansions. I taxonomize McMansions to be houses built after 1980, having 3,000+ square feet, constructed with low-quality materials/craftsmanship, and use a mishmash of architectural symbols to invoke connotations of wealth or taste, executed via poorly thought-out exterior and interior design.
Why, then, do certain countries build McMansions, and others do not?
Available Land
In order to build large houses in low-density neighborhoods, you have to have space into which you can sprawl. That being said - having lots of land does not directly correlate with having more large houses, however it is one of many factorsfavoring the formation of low-density, often greenfield (unoccupied lands used for agriculture, landscape design, or left alone indefinitely) developments where large houses are commonly found.
If we look at average house sizes around the world, the US, Australia, and Canada continue to have the largest homes.
However Russia, the largest country in the world by square-footage, has some of the smallest house sizes. This is due to a number of factors including the amount of habitable vs inhabitable land, a predilection towards living in dense cities, and the relatively small amount of new housing stock built each year.
Private Transportation Infrastructure (CARS!)
The countries with the largest houses are highly linked to car use and infrastructure for private transportation. Enjoy some data:
*** Walking or biking frequency, for 2012. Represents percent of population that walk or ride their bike to their destination either “all of the time” or “often.” Public transit usage, for 2012. Represents percentage who responded that they use public transit “at least once a week” or “every day or most days,” for 2012. (Other options in survey included “at least once a month,” “a few times per year,” “once a year or less,” or “never.”)
As we can see from this graph, the US, Australia, and Canada are more dependent on the car than most other highly developed nations. The amount of existing road infrastructure, gasoline consumption, etc. are a result of car commuting, a byproduct of urban expansion aka sprawl. Because this infrastructure is both convenient and already in place, until we run out of space or come to our senses, we are going to continue sprawling.
Restrictive/Inflexible Zoning Laws
Countries like the US (less so: Canada, Australia, and the UK) have more restrictive zoning laws than places like France, which allow for more flexible development. Zoning is the segregation of land into sections to be used for certain types of uses, such as residential, industrial or commercial.
Example of a zoning map (Santa Clara County, CA) via Richard Masoner (CC-BY-SA 2.0) (Blue is industrial, green is green space, red is commercial, orange = ?)
Zoning and building codes in the US have tended to benefit larger properties rather than smaller properties, greenfield and tear-down development rather than infill development (development using existing building stock or empty space within existing infrastructure) which is partially why US homes continue to spiral upward in size despite the effects of the Great Recession.
Mortgage Speculation, Products, and Incentivization
Many people ask why the US in particular has more McMansions than other countries. Part of the reason is because the US offers many more government incentives to buy a home.
For the last few decades over-investment in housing – the most unproductive form of accumulation of capital – has been heavily subsidized in 100 different ways in the U.S. government: tax benefits, tax-deductibility of interest on mortgages, use of the FHA, massive role of Fannie and Freddie, role of the Federal Home Loan Bank system, and a host of other legislative and regulatory measures.
The result was that the U.S. invested too much – especially in the last eight years – in building its stock of wasteful larger and larger homes and housing capital and of larger and larger private motor vehicles (whose effect on the productivity of labor is zero) and has not invested enough in the accumulation of productive physical capital (equipment, machinery, etc.) that leads to an increase in the productivity of labor and increases long run economic growth. This financial crisis is a crisis of accumulation of too much debt – by the household sector, the government and the country – to finance the accumulation of the most useless and unproductive form of capital, housing and large private trucks (calling them cars is a misnomer) that provide only housing services to consumers and have no effect whatsoever on the productivity of labor.
In Australia, lending standards were not eased to the same extent as elsewhere. For example, the riskier types
of mortgages, such as non-conforming and negative amortization loans, that became common
in the United States, were not features of Australian banks’ lending. In addition, Australian mortgages are “full recourse” following a court repossession action, and
households generally understand that they cannot just hand the keys to the lender to
extinguish the debt. The legal environment in Australia places a stronger obligation on lenders to make responsible
lending decisions than is the case in the United States.
Now, riskier mortgages do not necessarily mean that more people will build oversized houses, however riskier mortgages make larger houses easier to buy. This is the number one reason why US houses are so much bigger than other countries - because they are more attainable.
Cultural Traits
It’s not just economics that play into why people in certain countries buy larger homes - it’s culture. The US in particular (Canada and Australia perhaps by proxy) has put a huge emphasis on the large house as a symbol of success and wealth.
Suburban living is the cultural picture of the American dream. It wasn’t always, but the development of media such as television coincided with suburbanization and spread its bucolic image far and wide. Later in the 20th century, the obsession of celebrity culture and fine living further solidified the ideal of the large house in the mind’s eye of Americans. In addition, outside the cities, the rental market is drastically small, so homeownership is the norm.
In European countries (for example Italy) and Asian countries (for example Japan), multiple generations commonly live together in one house. Crowded space is associated with family rather than poverty. In America, every person has their own room, because that is our cultural definition of comfort, and until that definition is modified, the US will continue to build larger homes.
Well, that does it for this primer on why we build McMansions. Again, I apologize for the delay! Stay tuned for Thursday’s Arizona McMansion, and Sunday’s in-depth look at the McMansions of Canada.
