Prof Gascia Ouzounian’s presents a keynote lecture at The 17th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR 2025), hosted by University College London at UCL East.

This talk introduces the concept of vibrational architecture—architectures that foreground energetic, sonic, and vibratory capacities rather than treating vibration as an external, unwanted, or extraneous phenomenon. Beginning with Katarzyna Krakowiak’s Making the Walls Quake as If They Were Dilating with the Secret Knowledge of Great Powers (Polish Pavilion, Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2012), the talk examines how vibrations, tremors, and acoustic energies can reveal the interconnectedness of buildings and the wider ecologies in which they are embedded. Drawing on theorists and practitioners including Maryanne Amacher, Mark Bain, Steve Goodman, Nicole L’Huillier, Jonathan Tyrrell, Mendi + Keith Obadike, and Jan St. Werner, it traces a genealogy of vibrational practices that reconfigure architecture as a living, conductive field rather than a static enclosure. The talk further explores anti-monumental designs in which sound and movement dissolve the fixity of monumental form, proposing vibration as both an aesthetic and political force. In developing this materialist and transductive framework, the lecture advances an understanding of architecture as an energetic phenomenon in which matter and energy are continuously intertwined, co-producing the spaces we inhabit.

Where: Pool Street Cinema, UCL East

When: Friday, November 7, 2025 at 10 am.