Joanna Babadilla

The Silent Horns in the Vibrant City: Improvisation as an Architectural Method

This architectural exploration intends to listen to the city much like a jazz ensemble, attuned to the rhythms of the rumbling subway or thundering mass of steel and glass skyscrapers. For a moment, the city invites chaos and incoherence in the fleeting intervals of order.

Comparable to jazz and diasporic African culture, we can begin to embrace the breaks, accidents and the succession of surprises. It becomes clear that disruptions will happen, and rather than resisting it, the disruptions become a part of the rhythm which then becomes a thing of itself. As cities rose during the Industrial Revolution, jazz emerged during an era of construction, rapid urbanization and architectural innovation. It then echoed the modern sensibility of the city and transformed it into something new, in a musical manner known as ‘call-and-response’. There is a bridge between jazz and architecture, found not in its form and repetition but latent in the unpredictability and rhythmic complexity. The city asserts itself as a pulsing ensemble. From the clambering of countless footsteps towards places that await them or blazing sirens echoing in congested streets, the city has a rhythm of its own. 

Drawing on Le Corbusier’s study of Louis Armstrong, it becomes clear how the rhythms of urban life mirrored the dynamism of jazz improvisation.  Yet over time, this promise of freedom and innovation of a growing city came at a cost of the absence of spirit.  American architecture shaped spaces where machines were rendered static, incapable of operating musically and leaving the city alive but not living. Le Corbusier understood Armstrong’s musical expression as a reflection of the universal progress and order that architecture aimed to embody, suggesting that improvisation could take lead.  The architecture plays the role of the background ensemble, while the viewer becomes the improviser, unfolding rhythms as they move through the space.  

This thesis proposes a spatial ensemble where the unexpected is welcomed, rhythms defined as much by rupture as by order, and experiential navigation is celebrated as an improvisational act. In the end, this is far from jazz, but about how we experience, perceive, and improvise within the spaces we inhabit.