In the middle of all this, in the centre of a French financial empire that looks increasingly likely to topple, there is a graveyard. While the former residents of La Défense found themselves priced out of the market, some things, it seems, are still sacred. Lines of trees mark the exterior, and provide a sort of sound barrier from the roaring traffic that surrounds it, like a city under siege. Here, I can hear the silence of those who are no longer with us, and it is punctuated by the rustling of the leaves, and the gentle lilt of flowers lain on graves. Here, each thing has its silence. European graveyards are almost always silent. We need them that way, in order to hear those that are still talking to us; still shaping our lives. Who has time for that now, with so much money to be made? I look for a grave laid after the 1970s. Amid the war dead, and the family tombs festooned with commemorative plaques, there is an old grave. It is marked en perpétuité , which signals that this spot has been bought for eternity by the family of the deceased. I struggle to read the words, cut into the stone; they are gradually wearing away.
La Défense, the heart of France’s crumbling financial empire
giulio petrocco
there is no sound I wonder though, at the efficacy of our investigation. Do architects still think of their buildings as envelopes for sound, now each of us is the sovereign of their own ears? Perhaps this is the reason that La Défense and the library are not envelopes; sound is not proper to places anymore, but to people. We maintain the libraries of our ipods and music players almost as carefully as Walter Benjamin cared for the sounds of rough streets in Marseille. I don’t hate this world in which we each have our own life of sound. On the 6:30am train, full of tired eyes and red-rimmed anguish, it seems like a dignified way of bearing the solitude that one already has as a wage-labourer. The existence of this world does, though, change how we think about architecture. Streets are no longer envelopes, and objects no longer have their silence. The sounds housed by buildings only functions as interruptions – the gentle throb of a train is now a distraction from the sound track to the film of our lives.
In Thinking Architecture , Peter Zumthor refers to “the deepest architectural experience that I know” – early memories of his aunt’s house: small dark red hexagonal tiles, and the thin, cheap clatter of the door. These sounds are not gone of course. People can’t be listening to Ipods all the time. But in the BNF and at La Défense, I see a new relationship to sound, one suited to an age of individuals. If, for Walter Benjamin, each thing has its own silence, and one must be attentive to hear it, then in these spaces, each person can have their own sound, as the architecture drains everything else away, leaving people alone with themselves. j
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Marseille-Toulouse-San Francisco. 31 July-18 August 2012
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