The design competition for the League of Nations building in Geneva was a complex affair. A number of architectural historians have described the intricacies of the organisation of the competition and the questions raised over its ultimate implementation. The international dialogue on acoustics that took place after the competition was decided and once a ‘final’ design had been proposed, however, has received very little scholarly attention. In an extension of the focus on acoustics for diplomacy which was introduced in Chapter 3 with the work for the Assembly Chamber at Delhi, this chapter explores the manner in which acoustics for speech was a topic of substantial scrutiny and significance in the post-World War I legislative and diplomatic setting, and a critical architectural concern positioned at the nexus of science, industry, politics, and international transfers of knowledge. It also explores the changing public perception of acoustics from ‘scientific novelty’ to public health concern, examining both the social responses to this and the responses within organised acoustic research. This chapter also discusses the use of polemic and social movements in highlighting the effects of inadequate sound insulation in domestic construction and the increasing consequence of noise as a form of environmental pollution in the inter-war years.

On a Saturday in April 1924, a small group of musicians, architects, and physicists assembled in what was then the British government laboratory for research in building acoustics. The purpose of the gathering was to conduct a series of experiments to scientifically define acoustic conditions related to musical tone in buildings. Although they were not part of the official research agenda, these experiments were quietly sanctioned during a gap in the formal research programme for the Assembly Chamber at Delhi. Chapter 4 discusses the experimental work undertaken in 1924, the outputs, and their subsequent mid-century application in designing for musical tone in British concert halls. The chapter explores how the formal research programme for Delhi provided a framework for a new and informal research track in ‘designing for musical tone’ which was refined over the succeeding decades. It looks at the manner in which the numerical data from Delhi was used to quantify acoustic environmental conditions for concert hall design, and how the outputs were first implemented in the design of Cowles-Voysey’s White Rock music pavilion at Hastings.

London’s Royal Festival Hall is a building that draws on a long tradition of thinking and experimenting with architecture as both a musical and a scientific instrument. Very many of these experiments were founded on observations in existing buildings with different acoustic characteristics or implemented on an ad hoc basis. The Introduction to this book establishes a context to those experiments and those concepts. At the core of the book is an exploration of how they were expressed and explored though architecture. Other books have taken a wider historical sweep or examined the topic of acoustics in terms of intersectional studies within the discipline of architecture. This book, while it centres upon architecture, takes its essence from exchanges in that era that were interdisciplinary rather than intersectional. In interrogating the interdisciplinarity which was inherent to architectural acoustics in the first half of the twentieth century, it demonstrates how music, engineering, physics, metaphysics, revivalism, religion, and even occultism – in varying degrees of flagrancy or latency – were all pressed into dialogue with architecture.

This chapter shifts the focus from individual and domestic concerns to a broader international stage. It demonstrates a crystallising of the conceptual work that emerged in World War I through a series of controversies and catalysts surrounding the design and construction of Herbert Baker’s Assembly Chamber for the new city at Delhi in 1923. Baker’s Assembly Chamber was regarded as a scientific experiment (from drawing board to construction), and rather unusually, as this chapter demonstrates, scientists as well as architects were involved in its design. In the process, architectural acoustics was re-categorised from ‘special intelligence’ to ‘fundamental’ investigation, becoming embedded into a national programme of government-funded research, which marked the beginnings of formalised research in environmental science within the construction industry in Britain. Taking the Assembly Chamber at Delhi as a pivot point, this chapter explores the changing position of acoustics as a branch of environmental science in 1920s Britain. It demonstrates the manner in which the political and economic controversies surrounding the design and construction of the chamber acted as catalysts for the instigation of a new laboratory – located in a disused munitions factory near Perivale in London – and stimulated a broader programme of acoustic research. With reference to unpublished papers held in archives, this chapter brings to light the tensions that sustained early official research in the discipline of architectural acoustics.

London’s Royal Festival Hall opened its doors on 3 May 1951. The first concert hall to be built in Britain after World War II, Festival Hall was not just an iconic piece of architecture but also an archetype of designing for musical tone. Its design fused architecture, music, and science, and its construction process was interspersed with a series of tuning concerts that were implemented throughout 1950 and 1951 to allow for acoustic adaptation as the building was finalised. Drawing on the trajectory of experimental work and interdisciplinary collaborations that were explored in previous chapters, the Conclusion demonstrates how these informed the process at Royal Festival Hall. It also explores the differing forms of experience and expertise that formed a valid part of the hall’s construction. and the contemporary social and cultural priorities which were brought to the fore as a result. This is the point when international knowledge-sharing was becoming a reality, and when the formal and informal work of the preceding decades was ultimately expressed in a landmark building. This is the contemporary era of architectural acoustics.

In February 1902 a short notice in the London Times announced the intention of the authorities at Westminster Cathedral to conduct a tuning concert, the third in a series of large-scale experiments on the still uncompleted cathedral’s acoustic properties. iage of the first experiment, undertaken the previous summer, had been largely confined to the Catholic newspaper the Tablet. As the programme expanded, however, details began to filter with increasing regularity into the national press. Intended to showcase the effect of the new cathedral’s architecture on a particular musical style, the experiments capitalised on the specific acoustic context of the building to play with perception, creating ghost chords and ethereal effects. As a large-scale musical-acoustic experiment, the concerts were to resonate in the worlds of science and architecture for the next five decades, prompting a particular trajectory of scientific development and architectural innovation. This chapter explores those experiments and the role of Westminster Cathedral as a space for science and music. It examines the significance of the cathedral as a conceptual platform for further development in architecture, acoustics, and music, most publicly expressed in the renowned tuning concerts which informed the design of Royal Festival Hall in 1951.

Chapter 2 focuses on people, interactions, and transfers of knowledge. It interrogates changing perceptions of the role of science in architecture in the early twentieth century, as well as the tentative beginnings of both acoustic consultancy and the incorporation of ‘science as applied to building’ into the architectural curriculum in 1912. With reference to the personal papers of key figures, it outlines how a nexus of interdisciplinary networks was initially established and demonstrates the specific circumstances of the architect Hope Bagenal’s engagement with the physicist Wallace Clement Sabine at Harvard, as well as with the musicians Edward Dent and Richard Terry at Cambridge and Westminster Cathedral respectively. It also outlines the role of the Westminster Cathedral experiments in promoting scientific and design-based developments in architectural acoustics, and establishes the initial dissemination and uptake of Sabine’s work across the Atlantic. This chapter engages with changing attitudes to terminology and concepts of reverberation in contrast to the previous century, and it demonstrates how concepts of – and experiments in – musical tone were central to developments in architecture and in science. Finally, the chapter explores how chance encounters and the soundscapes of World War I furthered the trajectories outlined above, catalysing a new direction in architecture and applied design. In so doing, it maps a trajectory of thought and interdisciplinary collaboration that took shape under the most unlikely of circumstances.

Chapter 6 returns to St Paul’s Cathedral, illustrating how a lack of regulation in acoustics led to an influx of speculative proposals to address the acoustics under the dome, and the beginnings of electro-acoustic intervention. This chapter is a snapshot of a time, just before the outbreak of World War II, when the field of architectural acoustics was changing rapidly and radically. New products were flooding the market, and consultancy was increasing. The necessity of acoustic consultancy was accepted, but it was not regulated. This provided very definite opportunities for marketing and speculation. Taking transience and opportunity as its theme, this chapter explores three buildings and their acoustic contributions in greater detail: Abbey Road Studios and contemporary ideas on the design of spaces for recording music; the opportunities posed by impermanence in Burnett, Lorne, and Tait’s concert hall for the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1935, and finally, the enduring question of how to understand the acoustic intricacies of St Paul’s Cathedral. Acoustic consultancy factored into each of these in the 1930s, and the approaches and experimentation embodied in each of these instances would have implications for acoustic work during and subsequent to World War II.