Listening to buildings: exploring the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre through sound

Résumé 0

The Culture and Convention Centre Lucerne, KKL Lucerne, is a state-of-the-art concert and convention hall located at the shores of Lake Lucerne in Lucerne, Central Switzerland. Our work on KKL Lucerne is part of a larger project where we investigate cultural flagships as global objects emerging from relations spanning the world. In this article, we present how sound is both a productive object of study and a research tool in our aim to think of cultural flagships as multiple, vital and assembled buildings (Kraftl, 2010). The workshop “Making Noise - Sound in Urban Research Practice” at the University of Lausanne took place a few weeks before we went to Lucerne for fieldwork. It inspired us to reflect on the role of sound in the design, the atmospheres and the life of buildings (Berrens, 2016). Drawing on data from our exploration of the KKL and walkalong interviews, we study the multiple lives and relations that have shaped the building from genesis up to the present day. This article retraces our experiment with sound in the KKL through three moments and tells a particular fieldwork dynamic where sounds, spaces and affects are untangled to make sense of buildings.