The Architecture of Silence

In the high, thin air of the mountains, sound behaves differently. It does not travel so much as it dissolves, swallowed by the vastness of the slopes and the indifference of the stone. I have often wondered why we build in such places. Is it a desire to conquer the height, or a desperate, quiet plea to be closer to something that doesn’t speak back? We place our walls and our roofs against the backdrop of the eternal, hoping that the structure will hold a bit of our warmth against the cold, biting clarity of the peaks. There is a profound loneliness in a house that sits alone on a plateau, yet it is a chosen loneliness, a deliberate withdrawal from the clamor of the valley floor. It suggests that perhaps the most honest way to live is to exist on the edge of things, where the earth meets the sky and the only neighbor is the wind. If you were to stand there, in that thin, cold air, would you feel smaller, or would you finally feel like you had enough room to breathe?

Imran Dawood has captured this feeling in his work titled Shogran Panorama. It is a quiet study of a place that seems to be waiting for someone to arrive, or perhaps, for someone to finally leave. Does this stillness call to you, or does it make you want to turn back toward the noise?