Learning to Listen: Sound as an Overlooked Dimension of Architecture

Image ©  Yukiyasu Kaneko

Have you ever thought about sound in the spaces you love to spend time in?

When we talk about what makes a place great, we usually focus on how it looks. We notice the lighting, the materials, the layout. We might even comment on how it smells or feels to the touch. But we rarely think about how a space sounds, even though sound shapes our experience the moment we walk through the door.

I started noticing this during an evening at a small Japanese bar in Hackney, London. From the outside, it's easy to miss. Just another modest spot on a quiet residential street. Inside, it's small. You sit elbow-to-elbow with strangers at the bar, and every few minutes the train rumbles overhead with a low constant hum.

But somehow, it all works.

Even when the place fills up, with candles flickering and people chatting all around, I can still hear the person next to me clearly without raising my voice. Glasses clink, plates move through the room, music hums softly in the background but nothing feels overwhelming. The space buzzes with life without exhausting you.

Compare that to most pubs or bars in London. Hard floors, low ceilings, sound bouncing off every surface. Within an hour, everyone is shouting just to be heard. By the time you leave, you're mentally drained.

I could stay at this bar for hours. Sound settled into the space rather than colliding. My background as an architect taught me to pay attention to how spaces look and feel. But sitting there, I realised sound only matters when the brief demands it. Galleries, theatres, concert halls. Everywhere else, it's often forgotten.

The forgotten sound

Architecture has long privileged the visual. Buildings are drawn, rendered, photographed and published as images, while sound is far harder to capture or communicate. Light and material can be diagrammed, but sound rarely makes it onto the page and is often left out of the design process.

When sound does come up in design conversations, it's usually treated as a problem to solve, something about insulation requirements, noise complaints or compliance standards. We rarely ask the more interesting question. How does sound make people feel? How does it change the way we behave in a space?

And we put up with terrible acoustics all the time. We sit in echoing cafés, strain through noisy dinners and accept public spaces that leave us mentally drained. If a room were badly lit or poorly ventilated, we would quickly label it a failure. With sound, we often shrug and adapt.

Irish architect Michelle Delea speaks directly to this imbalance. She argues that considering the soundscape of a space is just as vital as thinking about how it looks. Architects confidently work with invisible elements like light, air, and temperature, but many still hesitate when it comes to sound because it feels unpredictable.

The irony is that the moment we enclose a space, we shape the air sound moves through. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we design sound every time we design space.

Sound isn't extra but essential

Delea makes a crucial point. Acoustic design often gets treated as a luxury, something added at the end if there's budget left. But sound fundamentally affects how people use space. It determines whether conversations flow, whether we can concentrate and whether we want to stay or leave.

For the 2025 Architecture Biennale, Delea created Assembly for the Irish Pavilion, a project that puts sound front and centre. Working with musicians and sound artists, she designed a space that deliberately reduces visual stimulation. Instead of demanding attention, it offers room to sit, talk and breathe. Sound isn't an afterthought. It's the core experience.

Delea argues for more genuinely quiet spaces in cities and believes meaningful change starts with education. Until architects learn to treat sound as a design tool rather than a technical constraint, it will continue to be overlooked.

Buildings that listen

Once you start paying attention, it becomes clear that sound is never neutral in architecture. Some buildings simply make this more apparent, using sound deliberately to shape how we move, pause and feel within a space.

Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany          Tate Modern Turn Hall, London, UK          Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany

| Image © Rasmus Hjortshøj  | Image © Rikard Osterlund                               | Image © Denis Esakov

Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum in Cologne is not silent, but sound moves through it gently. Footsteps soften, voices do not travel far, and the combination of brick, plaster, and wood absorbs just enough sound to slow you down. The building encourages attentiveness without enforcing silence.

Tate Modern in London takes a different approach, allowing sound to shift as you move through the building. In the vast Turbine Hall, footsteps echo loudly, amplifying the sense of scale. Upstairs, in the galleries, sound tightens and becomes more intimate. Without instructions or signs, the architecture guides behaviour through acoustics alone.

In the Jewish Museum Berlin, Daniel Libeskind uses sound to create discomfort rather than calm. In the empty voids, footsteps echo sharply off hard surfaces and silence feels heavy. Sound becomes part of the emotional experience, expressing absence, loss, and memory.

Denge, Kent, UK | Image © Tom Lee     The Whispering Gallery, London, UK | Image © Femtoquake   

Sound-aware architecture extends beyond museums. On the UK coast near Dungeness, the Denge Sound Mirrors are massive concrete listening structures shaped to capture and focus distant sound waves, showing how form alone can manipulate acoustics.

At St Paul’s Cathedral, the Whispering Gallery offers a more familiar example. Its dome was shaped so that sound travels along the curved surface rather than dispersing into the space below. The smooth, continuous geometry reflects sound sideways around the gallery, allowing even a softly spoken voice to carry clearly across the room, an intuitive understanding of acoustics long before modern engineering tools existed.

In each case, sound was not treated as a problem to control, but as a quality embedded in the architecture itself.

Back to the bar

This brings me back to that small bar in Hackney. It is not architecturally iconic, and there are no obvious acoustic interventions. The space simply doesn't fight sound.

The ceiling gives noise somewhere to rise and disperse. Low seating keeps conversation intimate. Music, voices and background activity blend into a steady hum rather than competing for attention. Whether carefully designed or simply well judged, the space offers acoustic ease that many larger and louder places lack.

It reminded me that comfortable sound isn't about eliminating noise. It's about letting it move well.

Learning to listen

If architecture is meant to shape how we live, work and spend time together, it cannot afford to keep ignoring sound. A space can look beautiful and still feel exhausting if it sounds wrong. The places we return to often succeed not because they are quiet but because they let us hear without effort.

Good sound design does not demand perfection. It simply asks for attention.

Maybe architecture does not need to get quieter. Maybe it just needs to learn how to listen.