The hospital soundscape

Sitting with my son who's now light of one leaking appendix, I'm in a dense environment of sounds. The vast majority of these sounds are artificial, created by the beeping, whirring, and squelching of the technology around us. The physical architecture of the hospital is only one component to the total 'design.'

But it seems like the soundscape could be endlessly improved ( as I lie awake at 3:00 in the morning listening to it all). Many of the sounds are informational cues for the attending staff- warning about low heart rates, empty IV bags, feeding times, etc, and across a ward of 20 rooms and 30 patients. The sounds are each distinctive enough, but it seems to me that with some coordination or even 'orchestration', they could work together so well that a nurse could be blind. You could listen to a ward the way a bird watchers hears a forest. You could tune the gaggle of technology to be distinctively different enough that a trained nurse would know what's happening without looking at a computer monitor.

FLW and the Theory of Everything

I had the great pleasure of visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Kraus House in St. Louis, recently restored to its full glory. Uniquely, this house still has all of the original FLW furniture, fittings, lights, and fabrics giving you the total Usonian experience.

The design of the house was based upon a 4' x 4' trapazoid, which became the planning and thematic grid for the house, much in the same way the Wright used triangles, hexagons, circles and other determinist geometry to organically 'grow' a building. The trapazoid here is expressed throughout, leading to the most extreme expression of a trapazoidal double bed which either shows a high level of creative mastery, or an absurd obsessiveness.

I'm wondering about the validity or ethic of forcing everything in the house to obey an

arbitrary design theme? Obviously it's been a favorite of modernists using grids (Mies) or tartan patterns or what have you, and applauded for their un-wavering adherence to their self-

inflicted order. This 'Theory of Everything' has not been unique to architects as the utopian tendencies of religion, physics, and all reason would like the idea that we can explain everything with one unifying group of ideas. Wright forced everything in this house into the same trapazoid, making every design question answerable with the same set of solutions. Is design stronger when it's forced into this artifice or is this just another excuse to pretend that humans have all the answers?