Listen to the Silence

Famously, FDR Four Freedoms Park was designed by Louis I. Kahn soon before his death in 1974 but not completed until 2012. The memorial, which features a raised lawn flanked by rows of Linden trees leading to a bust of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and “the room,” commemorates FDR's “Four Freedoms” speech from 1941. Kahn's project was shelved in the city's 1970s financial crisis, but interest in the architect and the project were revived after the release of My Architect, the 2003 documentary by Nathaniel Kahn about his famous father. 

Kahn was on hand on Tuesday, April 28, at the opening of Out of Silence, a sound installation by Finnish artist Hans Rosenström that, in Kahn's words, taps into the Estonian roots of his father, in which “trees speak, the trees have voices.” The artist, working with curator Alina Girshovich and Estonian vocal ensemble Vox Clamantis, has created a 15-minute composition that draws visitors through the memorial's allées while also giving them a reason to stop and appreciate the spaces formed by the trees. The focus of Kahn's memorial has always been on the room at the tip of the park, but Rosenström's piece reorients it toward the allées that were the work of landscape architect Harriet Pattinson, Nathaniel's mother.

Furthering the installation's Estonian connections are its inspiration and its timing. Out of Silence celebrates the life of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who will turn 90 later this year and who has worked with Vox Clamantis on numerous occasions. Curator Girshovich was inspired by a visit to the Arvo Pärt Centre, a repository of the composer's personal archive in Laulasmaa. Specifically, she liked the way people moved through a forest of pine trees to get from the car park to the building designed by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos. In turn, Rosenström devised an installation “that encourages movement,” he said on Tuesday, but is also “quite soft. It forces you to try to focus, to try to listen and create a relationship with your surroundings.”

Trying is not an understatement, given how portions of the sound installation are so soft the recorded vocals can't compete with sirens on the nearby FDR Drive, helicopters overhead, or even the sound of footsteps crunching on the gravel path between the trees; at other times, the vocals are strong enough to make people forget they are in the middle of a big city. This much should be apparent in the short video below, which features a recording we made of a portion of Vox Clamantis's improvised performance and a slideshow of some photos we took on Tuesday evening.