In Pursuit of Silence (35 page)

As Bauman spoke, I found myself thinking of the academic campus as a human brain. It’s now well understood that different cortical regions absorb input from more than one area. This is especially so with respect to the auditory cortex, which has great sensitivity to visual stimuli. There are enhancements of overall perception taking place all the time as information from one sense is cross-referenced with information coming from another sense. These so-called “cross-modalities” pervade our sensory model of the world.

At Gallaudet in the 1970s, the “brain” of the campus had reverted to the older model of discrete brain regions delegated to perform separate tasks. I recalled the many experiences throughout my journey of the past year that were setups for this sort of unfruitful, noisy dissonance.

How, I asked Bauman, did you overcome this when Deaf Space was launched?

To a huge extent, he told me, it was a matter of listening. The first ideas about Deaf Space were created with Deaf faculty and students in a series of workshops. “There’s a lot of lip service paid to ideas of inclusiveness today,” he said, “but this really was about handing the pencil to the people who best understand the Deaf experience. Real inclusiveness can help make a collective space.” He shrugged. “And I think this is one way Deaf Architecture could become an important influence. A lot of the global challenges we face today have spatial implications that need to be
solved inclusively. In the Sixth Street Corridor phase of Deaf Space, the Fifth Ward community will be involved the same way that students and faculty were at the outset.”

I took a stroll after our conversation to look at the Sorenson Language and Communication Center, the one building on Gallaudet’s campus thus far that has been completed with the principles of Deaf Space in mind.

As I entered a doorway set in the expansive glass grid that dominates the building’s façade, an abundance of sunlight played off different wood and metal surfaces, streaming through great chambers of open space. Putting the structure into historical context, one can identify traces of early modernism, a focus on what Le Corbusier called the
“great primary (geometrical) forms
,” along with repetition, symmetry, and the expansive use of glass to maximize sight lines. The architecture also pays homage to the traditional Mediterranean courtyard in providing access to natural light as frequently and widely as possible. (Deaf people are acutely conscious of the passage of the sun over the course of a day because of how the angle of light can help or hinder communication by sign language.) Colonnades and porches create permeability between inside and outside spaces. The idea of nurturing unimpeded circulation and free-flowing curvilinear movement is apparent in exterior walls and interior corridors. All the emphasis on transparency and openness enables people to rely on visual cues where one would ordinarily depend on sound. There’s a sense of being in multiple perspectives, multiple sight lines, simultaneously.

Bauman described the overall aspiration of the space to me as “cubist.” The completed building and sketches for additional structures I saw also made me think again of Louis Kahn. Kahn was a zealous champion of natural light, arguing that, while artificial light could convey only one static moment of light, natural light, with its
“endlessly changing qualities
,” made each room “a different room every second of the day.” Kahn also believed in a mystical connection between the principles of light and silence, with silence representing the desire for expression, and light as that which bestows presence. Of the pyramids, he wrote that to look at them today, when all the cruel circumstances of their construction had faded,
“when the dust is cleared
, we see really silence again.” And this silence in the guise of light sculpted by architecture links us to the
“prevalence of spirit
enveloping the Universe.”

When I wandered back to find Bauman, the last of our students had arrived and we got into a van to drive to the Trinidad Recreation Center less than a mile away. Other student groups were meeting with community members at other locations. At the center, we met Wilhelmina Lawson, a regal, soft-spoken woman wearing a bright red cap and big black sunglasses, who heads up the Neighborhood Action Committee of the Fifth Ward. Unfortunately, she was the only community member to appear. “I gave out as many fliers as I could,” Lawson said. She addressed the Gallaudet students for a few minutes, confirming Bauman’s remarks about the challenges facing the community and saying that she wanted to strengthen the partnership with Gallaudet as
a way of de-marginalizing them both. She herself had come to the District from a “concrete jungle” in New Jersey—against all the advice of her family and friends. But she’d fallen in love, she said, with the neighborhood’s trees, flowers, and “above all,
children
.” She had tried, she said, “to turn the Fifth Ward from a drug community into a garden community.”

Bauman, putting a good face on the low turnout, spoke a little more about his excitement for the Sixth Street Corridor, the pedestrian walkways that would actively stitch the two communities together. Ideas for what will be housed in the buildings lining the corridor are still being developed, but part of what Gallaudet hopes to inspire through the development is a dialogue about silence itself. In addition to facilities like a child development center and community theaters, the university is considering more provocative venues, like a silent drinking establishment in which, whether one is hearing or Deaf, spoken communication will be prohibited.

Though this idea might sound hopelessly fanciful, one of my more delightful forays into silence was a
Quiet Party
, staged at a SoHo bar called Madame X. The brainchild of two city friends, Paul Rebhan and Tony Noe, who met up for drinks one night in 2002 but couldn’t find a single bar that wasn’t deafeningly loud, Quiet Parties are now held on a fairly regular basis in cities around the world. Guests meet in spaces separated from a larger bar. They’re provided with pencils and notecards. All talk is forbidden and the room itself is kept quietish (very low or no music; subdued clatter from behind the bar).

The night I went to Madame X the red-lit room was crowded with people, and the loudest sound was the soft laughter sparked
as guests read each other’s written wit. It was mostly a singles scene, but one with a refreshing, unfamiliar note of gentleness. The young men and women hailed from all over the world (Korea, Tunisia, France, and Russia), and included chemists, accountants, students, and teachers. I kept my cards from that night. Several of my silent acquaintances wrote about the need to create more refuges like the Quiet Parties. (“Indeed—there are no silent zones anywhere!”) Some were funny. (“I must be drunk—I’m blurring my letters.”) And a few waxed lyrical.

Other ideas for the Sixth Street Corridor include plans for a space that will replicate aspects of Deaf experience. In a soundproof chamber, the designers plan to display an array of noisemaking technologies on which the hearing rely for entertainment and information—but without the sound. “We want to get people to talk about what that experience is, and about how they reorient to the space itself in complete silence,” Fred Weiner, the special assistant to the president for planning at Gallaudet told me.

The project Bauman was organizing with the Gallaudet students and the Fifth Ward community members was a photography exercise intended to explore the different ways they each looked at the world. We were to pair up—one Deaf student with one Fifth Warder and a camera—and walk through the neighborhood up to the Capital City Market. The person holding the camera would be guided by the other to the shot they wanted to snap—whereupon the “eye” would tap the shoulder of the person holding the camera. I was
paired with Erin
, a gentle young blond woman
with deep-set eyes. She’s a business student at Gallaudet, and I was a bit disappointed not to have been partnered with someone working more directly on the architecture project so that I would get a sense of what it was like to see the world with that kind of special visual consciousness.

But the experience with Erin was revelatory. I consider myself a reasonably visually aware person, but she guided me to different viewpoints with unbelievable precision and got me to look at things from perspectives that would never have occurred to me. While sirens wailed and the wind gusted loudly, she led me to a brick façade with an inlaid pattern of white diamonds, a corner of a neo-Tudor building, four boarded-up windows in a brick wall that from the angle she chose looked classical. She kept moving my hands, changing the angle, changing the depth of field from wide angle to telephoto, making me kneel down very close or lean back to catch the sky. We took multiple, minutely varying shots of the red door at a child-care center. At a certain point, I realized that I’d completely lost track of time. I’d slipped into silence and had an awareness of the movement of sunlight on stone and grass, skin, paint, and cloud surface that was truly uncanny. When I ran into Bauman, I told him that now I thought I understood what he’d meant about cubism and Deaf Space. “Yeah,” he said, “you see now! It’s the way Erin is trying to take in everything—to show you the totality of a condition.”

After the exercise had been completed, I got into conversation with another Gallaudet student majoring in business, a lightly goateed and heavily tattooed
young man named Michael
. He said he’d been partnered with several community members inside a church. “What they wanted me to snap,” he said, “were
objects that reflected the values of their community, but with no attention for the objects themselves. So they’d say, ‘Flowers are important to my community’—and then they’d guide me anywhere where the flowers were in the frame. I’d encourage them to take the picture from different angles—bird’s-eye view, from the right, the left, up, down, back and forth. I wanted to get them to take it from different perspectives—to see what it was and how it fit in with everything else in the church.”

Michael’s experience revealed the way that the community members were letting words and concepts blind them to the actual world they were standing in. The idea of “flowers” hid the blossoms themselves. The unassuming young man, because of his knowledge of silence, was able to show the hearing world how to see.

But how might this expanded perspective play out in architecture? Were there tangible gains a hearing person might receive from the Deaf knowledge of silence and space?

Robert Sirvage is
a Deaf graduate student
in architecture who has helped Bauman formulate some of the central tenets of Deaf Space. Sirvage has an auburn beard, sideburns razored close to his sharp cheekbones, and eyes that gleam with a striking pale-blue light.

He is writing his dissertation on proxemics—the study of how people move through space. When two Deaf people are walking together while signing, a complex choreography unfolds in which the person not actively signing is also watching over the
other’s steps to protect them from falling or colliding with something. This has implications for how close together two Deaf people will walk. Sirvage referred to the process of Deaf people walking together as a “package agreement.” Bauman’s brother Dirksen, who teaches Deaf studies at Gallaudet, described the emphasis in Deaf culture on engagement with others. He maintains that among the hearing, the ability to hear oneself speak is crucial to how we maintain our sense of being present in the world. But this kind of “auto-stimulation” is unavailable to the Deaf. Instead, he maintains, what the Deaf have is “the face of the other as you sign.” This fact of always being held in the visual embrace of another person, he believes, creates the basis for a collectivist culture.