Listening and the League of Nations : Acoustics Are the Argument

In the debates following the 1926-27 competition for the new headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva, the acoustic aspect was largely overlooked. The competition coincided with the formation of architectural acoustics as a profession and an academic discipline. Looking at this coincidence sheds new light on the reasoning of Peter Meyer and Sigfried Giedion, who, in support of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s scheme, gave remarkable prominence to arguments about acoustics. The transmission of speech in the large Assembly Hall with seating for 2,700 could not be resolved by traditional techniques, and opinions on the modern method of electroacoustic amplification differed greatly. The protagonists who stepped forward in favor of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s scheme, for which Gustave Lyon served as acoustic advisor, emphasized the sound quality of their design for the large Assembly Hall. Despite the acoustically infeasible competition brief, they declared literal understanding, based on the intelligibility of speech, to be a fundamental function of the League of Nations headquarters. The questions raised in this paper relate to architecture’s aurality and visuality, as well as claims concerning function in debates on Modernism. Diplomatic understanding was evidently at stake in the League of Nations’ political program, but, curiously, literal understanding was neglected in the acoustic design for the Assembly Hall by many of the competitors and the jury, and apart from a short remark by Jacques Gubler in 1985 was subsequently overlooked by historians.


Introduction: Understanding at the League of Nations
This paper revisits the arguments following the 1926-27 competition for the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva, often referred to as the Palace of the League of Nations.While the architects were concerned with looking at the plans and elevations, at the stage of the competition many of them largely overlooked the projects' acoustical feasibility, which would come to play a prominent role in the assembly hall's technical performance, as well as in the protagonists' rhetoric and Modernism's claims to functionality: "The design they [Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret] had submitted was essentially one for a place to wor k in , corresponding to contemporary requirements.It incorporated entirely new technical solutions in the Office Wing, an acoustically perfect Assembly Hall," 1 as the authoring architects themselves stated in the first volume of the OEuvre Complète.
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's scheme was designed using state-of-the-art technologies, both in the acoustical design of the auditorium for the large Assembly Hall, which drew on advice from Gustave Lyon, as I will explain in this paper, and in the communication equipment for the offices, where electroacoustic apparatuses were devised.When investigating the hall's acoustical feasibility more closely, elemental questions relating to the nature of Le Corbusier's approach to architecture's performance as a place "to work in " remain to be 1 Le Corbusier: Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret.OEuvre Complète de 1910-1929.Zurich: Girsberger, 1937, p. 161 (original   emphasis).
calculates the time that a sound signal takes to pass the human ear's hearing threshold at zero decibel.If the duration is too short, the sound is considered "dead" or "dry," but this mostly applies to concert halls and is seldom considered problematic elsewhere.Much more often, and especially in the case of halls for speech, the reverberation time may be too long, and the words spoken cannot be understood.Such long reverberation times, or echo, may be desirable for chants in a Gothic cathedral; in the auditorium for the assembly of the League of Nations delegates, where international understanding lay at the heart of the program, it was not.
According to the reverberation formula "T = 0.16 V / A," which is still in use today, the reverberation time is calculated proportional to the volume of the space, and reversely proportional to the absorbing capacity of the materials.As a sketch for the archive shows, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret calculated the volume per person in the auditorium.The total number of persons required by the competition brief to be seated in the Assembly Hall added up to 2,675; this number resulted from the program requirements, which listed a party of 25 speakers at the center of the podium (including the president, secretary general, and interpreter), 400 delegates, 400 secretaries, 250 diplomats, 600 journalists, and an audience of 1,000.
unintelligible.In the article, function is emphasized to the point of becoming a rhetoric, and we can only assume that, as editor, Peter Meyer was instrumentalizing Franz Max Osswald's scientific expertise in the service of his own Modernist propaganda.In a single sentence, Osswald's text refers to function (in German: "Zweck," "Zweckmässigkeit") three times. 13Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's scheme was the only one to receive any praise for its acoustical design in the article.Nevertheless, Osswald still considered its 40,000 cubic meters to exceed the ideal auditorium volume of 10,000, or at most 20,000, cubic meters.
Auditorium geometries where sound was reflected and directed primarily by the ceiling were a standard feature of architectural handbooks around 1930, and Osswald himself experimented with architectural geometries, for example in his own hors concours proposition for an Assembly Hall for the League of Nations (see Fig. 17, lower right).He also experimented with models of an "auditorium with variable volume" 14 for which he built both a large presentation model and an acoustic study model.The images produced from these models followed Wallace C. Sabine's examples, which employed a technique adapted from schlieren photography. 15-6.Osswald's photographic experiments for an auditorium of variable size in 1930.

Directing Sound
Few of the competitors articulated their solutions for the auditorium's acoustics as explicitly as Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret did in their graphic presentations.The panels were clearly didactic, placing their own auditorium plan next to a diagrammatic explanation-in bright and bold red letters-of the "salle de format favorable à l'acoustique."In counterpart, a circular and a semicircular shape were boldly, in black lettering, said to be "2 salles de format anti acoustique"; 16 such shapes (and this was not difficult to predict) occurred in many of the competition entries.Symmetrical plans with curved walls were a typical nineteenth-century solution for auditoriums and derived from the auditorium's precursor, the Greek amphitheater.For Le Corbusier, however, amphitheaters belonged to a completely different typology, being open to the sky.
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret relied on completely different references, those of modern architectural acoustics.They were advised by Gustave Lyon, a French engineer who had made a name for himself as director of the Parisian piano manufacture Maison Pleyel.As the director of Pleyel, Lyon devised a concert hall according to the laws of directed sound, calculating the time it took sound to travel from the orchestra to the audience.The ceiling was parabolically curved and low enough to prevent overly long delays between the direct sound and the reflected sound, which would be desirable neither with regard to the intelligibility of the spoken word nor to the clarity and distinctness of musical sound.
Lyon's internationally acclaimed design for the Maison Pleyel concert hall became a model for parabolic ceiling geometry in auditoriums.However, as the sound traveled not only from the podium to the audience but vice versa, it disturbed both the musicians and the music itself.The rear of Salle Pleyel wall was therefore, after its first remodeling, lined with absorbent Molleton.Photos, plans, and sections of the concert hall were published internationally, in the state with the absorbent rear lining.On July 18, 1928, the highly flammable Molleton caught fire, 17 and a young American died.In view of this tragedy, Gustave Lyon addressed a personal letter to Le Corbusier on July 21 expressing his regret and saying that the repair would be undertaken "without delay." 1813.Sketch explaining acoustics, lighting, and ventilation of the large hall for the General Assembly (1929).
Correspondence between Gustave Lyon and the atelier of Le  Old formulas were to be replaced with new ones, a project on which Le Corbusier and Lyon embarked with enthusiasm.In a letter dated August 26, 1927, 21 the acoustician called the architect "our expert delegate" and gave him substantial credit for the renewal in architectural acoustics.In return, the architect praised the acoustician on the front page of the evening edition of L'Intransigeant 22 of October 15, 1927: "Acoustique: Une conquête de la technique moderne" was a eulogy on Lyon's calculations of the sonic realm by mathematical formula.The laws of statics and dynamics having been recognized a long time ago, it was thanks to Gustave Lyon and his science that acoustics had escaped from the world of mysteries.Now that these acoustic laws had been successfully applied in the Salle Pleyel, wrote Le Corbusier, it would no longer be possible to build a theater as before.
In 1928, Lyon defended Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's League of Nations competition entry, as part of the vast and vehement public campaign in the course of which the cousins filed a lawsuit against the award of the building commission to a team composed of other prize winners, who, they claimed, had stolen many ideas from their scheme.In a public declaration in the second issue of Cahiers d'Art, Lyon signed the "manifestation des savants, des industriels, des poètes, des financiers en faveur du projet le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret" 23 jointly with 83 prominent Parisians and international celebrities, among them composers, directors, and writers.
Lyon was not mentioned in the project description in Cahiers d'Art, but his name was all the more prominent on the two following pages: "La Salle Pleyel.Une preuve de l'évolution architecturale" was the title of Le Corbusier's article honoring "le savant directeur de la Maison Pleyel qui vient de sortir victorieux de ses quarante années de recherches."In it, Le Corbusier argued that the "chimera of acoustics" had been vindicated 21  Pierre Jeanneret's project, although he admitted in the Zurich newspaper that these were "precarious matters, especially as the experts of the young science of acoustics do not always agree." 30 A few months later, in his extensive article on the competition in Bauwelt of November 3, 1927, Giedion again repeated Osswald's arguments against over-large auditoriums, along with his criticism of inadequate sound quality in contemporary loudspeaker technology and the idea that auditoriums should preferably be designed with variable size.Giedion seems to have completely appropriated Osswald's knowledge as his own, and by this point no longer mentioned his name.
Of the four crucial functions that Giedion lists for the Palace of Nations in his Bauwelt article, the acoustics inside the General Assembly auditorium took the first place, followed by the organization of the offices, the circulation of traffic, and the complex's relationship to the landscape.Regarding the acoustics of the large Assembly hall, Giedion argued that any volume larger than 20,000 cubic meters would cause acoustic problems, pointing out that some architects had devised spaces of 260,000 cubic meters or prided themselves on recreating the Pantheon for the Great Assembly.According to his newly acquired expert knowledge, the 2.4 square meters for each of the 2,600 persons, as laid out in the competition brief, would need to be reduced; otherwise the result would be in a space beyond control, where "the human voice is not expected to be present." 31He did mention the possibility of loudspeaker amplification, but discarded it immediately: "At the current moment, loudspeakers with their distortion and interference make it hopeless from the outset to believe that any such monumental ambition could be satisfied unconditionally by these means." 32edion gave detailed explanations of the two projects he favored, the one by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret (awarded one out of nine ex aequo first prizes), and the one by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer (awarded one out of nine second mentions).The presentation of the two was unequal, however.Expanding at length on acoustics for the first scheme, he abandoned the topic when presenting Meyer and Wittwer's project, in which the authors had decided to resolve the sound transmission issue by using loudspeakers.Instead, Giedion emphasized the auditorium design as devised by Gustave Lyon for Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, providing abundant explanations on "acoustical quality" ("Hörsamkeit") and a comparative section of the Salle Pleyel.
15. "Acoustical Quality" ("Hörsamkeit") in Giedion's expert explanation, Bauwelt, 1927.On the one hand, the comparison of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret's auditorium with the Salle Pleyel, both reproduced at scale 1:800, elevated the unrealized project to the level of a European cultural monument.On the other, the assembly hall for Geneva was clearly bigger than the concert hall in Paris, prompting Giedion's critical comment that "it will be interesting to test the extent to which the human voice can penetrate such large spaces." 33Here, he no longer seems certain that the acoustics are truly feasible.The "acoustic security" invoked in Le Corbusier's own texts for the competition seems to falter; however, Giedion soon gets back on course and closes his long explications on acoustics with the remark that others have designed far larger auditoriums.
Why did the propagandists of Modern architecture not argue for loudspeaker transmission?Some of them did, but their arguments were largely ignored, as they did not serve the argument of architecture's functionality in Le Corbusier's scheme.Just two decades later, when the United Nations headquarters 34 was designed and built between 1946 and 1952 in New York, loudspeakers, simultaneous interpretation booths, and radio transmission had become taken for granted as ways to ensure auditory understanding between the nations.There is no doubt that the quality of sound transmitted by loudspeaker amplification before the end of the 1930s was questionable-yet the criticism that electroacoustics lacks authenticity is still upheld today, in the age of hi-fi and wave field synthesis.In 1927, a few competition entrants were already praising the potential of large loudspeakers as "a modern invention" by which, no matter how long the conduits, the sound could be transmitted without distortion even to the outermost corners, and-something that may have sounded futuristic in the ears of a public used to loud public speaking-"speaking in a large space will be possible at a normal volume." 35w that Osswald's critique has resurfaced from the archives and can be introduced into the historiography of the League of Nations competition, we can better understand Giedion's advocacy of acoustic quality and his reasoning regarding loudspeakers.Giedion's doubts about the acoustic performance of Le Corbusier's "acoustically perfect" scheme are, we may speculate, expressed in a handwritten note on the last page of his own offprint of Osswald's Schweizerische Bauzeitung article: "2,700 persons: this means: the world is watching" ("2700 Personen: das heisst: die Welt ist Zuschauer"). 36Whether intended or not, the idea that the world is watching, and not listening, leaves the problem of acoustics unresolved.While the literal "understanding"-that is, hearing-of words in the auditorium of the Great Assembly was the crucial argument for some of the Modernist actors presented here, all of them seemed to have recognized the impossibility of a solution that would deliver what one could fairly call "acoustical quality." In a long and irritated letter dated October 2, 1927, Richard Neutra, who had submitted unsuccessfully with Rudolph Schindler, 37 went as far as to conclude that acoustics were not a real concern for the hall for the General Assembly because the "entire representational fall session of the League of Nations is undoubtedly rather The League of Nations assembly hall had to serve the purposes of international understanding in the political sense, and in the literal sense of understanding the words spoken, for nearly 2,700 people.This had no precedent in any tradition of indoor building."2,700 persons: this means: the world is watching," we can speculate further, anticipated telecommunication networks.And yet Giedion insisted that the large Assembly Hall was a physical space of the analogue, an auditorium according to the principles of the lecture halls with which he was familiar; only under these conditions could Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's Modern project be presented as more apt, more feasible, and ultimately more functional than other projects-as a Modern solution superior to traditional forms of architectures of representation.
Remarks such as Giedion's on the world watching, or Neutra's remark on theatrical ritual in which acoustics are of no importance, raise questions not only on the visuality and aurality of architecture, but fundamentally on modern argumentation concerning functionality.In 1928, in Une maison-un palais, Le Corbusier elucidated the large Assembly Halls's acoustics, lighting, and ventilation in a 28-page chapter: "Une salle pour 2,600 personnes, organe de visibilité et d'audition." 39In 1930, in Précisions, the chapter on acoustics 40 is abbreviated, but illustrated with two pages of drawings, which are shown with the original red highlighting of the sound reflections.Also in red are the words "pas d'onde retardée," the core concept of Gustave Lyon's principle for auditorium acoustics. 41eproduced in Précisions in black and white with long explanations, 42 these drawings are based on Lyon's theory.While acousticians in 1927 embraced loudspeaker technology, albeit hesitantly, as a potential, architects in 1930 still enforced the idea that the problem had to be resolved by the architecture itself, by the sound reflections coming from the walls and the ceiling."Understanding each other by means of the ear" (in other words, without electroacoustic assistance), Le Corbusier wrote, was the only way to a true understanding.The problem was one of the senses: "de l'oeil et de l'oreille: visibilité et acoustique, dans un lien où l'on réunit comme en une véritable Tour de Babel, les gens de tous le pays et de toutes les langues, en des débats dont l'enjeu est la paix du monde.S'entendre des oreilles est le seul chemin que peut prendre le coeur ou la raison." 43 Corbusier's interest in acoustics was programmatic in that acoustics was a modern science; it was not limited to the technological, but also embraced the psychological and physiological.On the fourteenth of the competition panels, with a bird's-eye rendering of the entire complex and four perspective sketches of the General Assembly's exterior and interior, the lobby, and the roof garden, the words collaged next to the sketches are remarkable: the Great Assembly is described as the "heart" (next to the exterior view) and as the "throat," the "eardrum," and a "vessel of light" 44 (next to the interior view).In the Modernist rhetoric around the League of Nations competition, it was clearly the technological aspect of acoustics that was instrumentalized in the claims that a project was feasible, functional, and forward-looking.
himself described the Palace of Nations as a building with an "acoustically perfect Assembly Hall" for not only the administrators, but also the vast number of nearly 2,700 speakers and listeners "to work in."But while they emphasize acoustics as a fundamental function in architecture, the actors in the debates over the competition's outcome pick and choose from modern science.The programmatic exclusion of electroacoustic technologies in Meyer's and Giedion's lines of argument demonstrates that the young science of acoustics was consulted only selectively, and was instrumentalized in claims to be Modern without any further interest in a technological future-which in terms of electroacoustic communication was still decades away.The first fall session in the Palace of the League of Nations was held in September 1937, in an Assembly Hall of approximately 19,000 cubic meters and 1,540 seats, thus considerably smaller than the size given in the competition brief, and initially without loudspeaker equipment. 45e episodes of debate over its acoustics in the years from 1927 to 1930, which I have outlined in this paper, suggest that function is a performance projected onto architectural programs.History will resound in a different timbre if we understand function anew: as program, as projection, and as performance.Acoustics, and this is my argument, gives us the opportunity to revisit the history of the League of Nations competition and of 1920s architectural discourses.Without listening, there can be no understanding.

Acknowledgments
This paper was developed from research conducted for my dissertation "Hellhörige Häuser.Akustik als Funktion der Architektur.1920-1970" ("Proof of Sound.Acoustics as a Function of Architecture, 1920-1970"), an investigation into the conjunction and interdependency of the modern science of applied acoustics and architectural problems in the first half of the twentieth century.
I would like to thank Prof. Laurent Stalder and Prof. David Gugerli of E.T.H. Zurich, as well as Ing.Kurt Eggenschwiler of Empa for their astute advice during the writing of the doctoral thesis on which this paper is based, and Kate Sturge of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin for her help in editing this first English text on the debates on acoustics at the League of Nations.

Fig. 13 :
Fig. 13: Centre Canadien d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, CCA Collection DR1985:0625: Le Corbusier.Concept diagrams in longitudinal section and plan of the acoustical, lighting, and air circulation systems for the Great Hall of the Palace of the League of Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, December 1929.Pen and ink, 27.0 x 21.1 cm.©FLC-ADAGP.