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this is 99% invisible I'm Roman Mars and this is Jeff Maino my name is Jeff Maino I'm Roman Mars and this is Jeff Maino. My name is Jeff Maino. I'm a

architecture writer and blogger based in Los Angeles. And for seven years he has

written a website called Building Block, which is about architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures.

I've always liked the sounds of things and the acoustic nature of walking through the city or even just the sense that when you're walking down a hall that has really rich,

lush wall coverings, the right side can sound totally different from the left side.

I've just always been interested in those sorts of acoustic aspects of architectural space.

Most architects, if they design for sound, what they're actually designing to do is design for silence.

They're designing to keep sound out of the environments.

They're designing to make sure that you don't hear the street

sounds that are happening outside or that you're insulated from cars driving by

or from the gravel plant up the road.

So it's really an architecture of silence that people

tend to be designing for. But you know having said that there was an

interesting project a couple years ago by an architect named Joel Sanders.

There was basically an architectural design. Instead of

standard glass windows, it would use things like parabolic microphones, kind of

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