Acoustic, Design and Architecture have a long intertwined history. Sound and Matter, the last Design Museum Holon’s exhibition (29th June – 28th October), put it into an interesting perspective, transforming part of the building into a musical instrument, creating an experiential sound space and analyzing historic and contemporary object.

“With this exhibition, we wanted to provide visitors with something truly experiential where the building itself is given a voice and visitors find themselves listening to it. For the first time, the exhibition premises are used in their entirety with an attentive eye on how each sound, each piece, each element can and should be juxtaposed to the space at hand”. with these words Maya Dvash, Chief Curator of Design Museum Holon, introduces “Sound and Matter”, the last museum’s exhibition, realized in collaboration with Morel,  leading manufacturer of speaker components and audio systems company.

Upon arrival, “The Sound of Architecture” an installation curated by Anat Safran and Lila Chitayat, exploits the building’s architecture and the capacity of its hollow corten ribbons to function as echo chambers to create an all-immersive “musical arena”. The Design Museum Holon’s iconic building, designed by Ron Arad, is transformed into a musical instrument, with 100 speakers located in different areas, and visitors become the composers, into a multi-sensory space.

Inside the Museum, the Upper Gallery features “Seeing Sound”, an exhibition containing over 50 objects designed from the 1960s to the present. The curators,  Anat Safran, Lila Chitayat and Elisabetta Pisu, have divided the items into three categories – stationary, mobile, and interactive – exemplifying the conceptual shift from object design to the design of a user experience.
The lower galley, instead, hosts a resonating chamber, where original sound works composed especially for this space, are translated into visual representations influenced by the movement of the visitors: “Sense Sound” is designed to transport the people in an environment where movements of sound become visible and thus visual and tangible character of sound becomes clear.  

The materiality of sound is the key point of the other two exhibitions: the jewellery artist Dana Hakim Bercovich’s “Through the Mesh“, where metal mesh (speaker grille) used in loudspeakers and audio equipment are turned into unique jewellery pieces that can be worn on the body, and “Loops”, where different items from the Museum collection exemplify the importance of the notion fo repetition both in sound and in design.
Objects, space and environment: sound and matter found a real link along all the exhibition, and as Maya Dvash concludes, it appears clear how “Sound is one of the most significant “raw materials” in the designer’s toolbox”.
Text by Gabriele Masi.