Abstract
Silence and the Embassy: A year in an abandoned Cold War icon
Sound butts in, and then falls back, pushing forth its source, whether object, body, music or movement, into the frames of perception. I stand by sound, and sound invades my space – it disrespects borders, thereby making explicit the intensity of territory
In 2018, the US government moved its Dutch embassy to a new building in a suburb of The Hague and closed their previous headquarters near the city center. The original building is a 1950 brutalist monument designed by Marcel Breuer, which had always contrasted painfully with the elements of its 18th-century plaza, its beautiful brickwork, imitation gas lights, and linden trees. Of course the Americans did not move for esthetic reasons: its location downtown made it a security risk and the Americans were as unhappy with it as were the local residents who detested the black hole it had made in the urban fabric. This essay is the story of how I came to spend a year in the abandoned ex-embassy, an icon of Cold War architecture.
My background is as a performing musician, musicologist, and radio producer. I grew up in the United States and lived most of my adult years in Paris. My positionality is important in what follows: although American by birth, I feel a strong disconnect from mainstream American culture and politics. Among other projects, I pursued an interest in architecture, specifically looking at how the built environment affects our perception of sound, a topic I continue to explore in my radio shows and as part of my studies at Leiden University. A few years ago, I settled in The Hague and began looking for a music studio.
Living in and out of Holland, I had vaguely followed the closing of the American Embassy in the papers, but never thought it would affect me in any way. But one day in March 2018, I got a surprise call from a real-estate company asking if I were interested in a studio downtown. No, they could not tell me what building. No, they were not allowed to say anything. Could I meet them in an hour? I showed up at the mystery meeting, and to my utter astonishment, was led into the previously high-security embassy building, where movers were busy shifting boxes and beefy men in dark suits were ripping out cables from the ceiling. The next day they were all gone, and I was given a key, and a security briefing on my new role—somewhere between renter, artist, and amateur guardsman.
And that is how I entered this very spooky haunted building, a place which had been sealed off from public view for more than 30 years, a place of secrets, mystery, hierarchy, borders, and (sometimes) silence.
This article is an inquiry into sound, situating itself between artistic research and experiential stream-of-consciousness. Because the experiences detailed here were unique and irreproducible, it is difficult to draw generalizations. But I will share my own personal conclusions and discoveries, which create questions for my future academic research.
At first I had no methodology. My initial purpose in the former embassy was simply to setup a recording studio. I admit I was seduced by the air of “international mystery” around the building, but I had no intention of studying it. Thus, my research path involved much Brownian motion, almost as if I was the one being experimented upon (a fact which took me many months to realize). As the building acted upon me, I became obsessed with it. I began to experiment and observe, I began to read the literature on silence and study brutalist architecture in depth, I researched spying, the CIA, and secrets, and I became active in exorcising the demons which I felt around me. I launched a podcast which became a method for me to observe and document the building, and get feedback from a wider audience. In the podcast, I explored issues of censorship, erasure, secrets, and politics which I had not previously considered part of my artistic path.
In the following pages, I would like to give you a sample of my experiences, and the surprising ways in which the building changed my perceptions—of sound, borders, and boundaries.
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If artwork is a signal, as Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) suggests in his Relational Aesthetics, then this building was signaling non-stop….
The Americans took their desks, their office supplies, their files, their coffee mugs, and of course their secrets, their conversations, their deals. But they left behind the signs and the signals. Everywhere: “Call Marine on Duty” “Surge Suppression Indicator” “Danger, High Voltage” “In emergency dial 2930” “In case of fire, do not use elevator” “Fire Alarm: Break Glass. Press Button” “Escape Here” “Vault Alarm” “Pull for alarm” “Dial x222 in emergency” “Alarm Warnings: Fire-Continuous Siren/ Terrorist Attack: High-Low Wail/Bomb Alert: Rapid Repeated Beeps” (that one was in all-caps); “Press Bar: Alarm Will Sound” or the ominously anti-climactic “Emergency Distress in Gym when Flashing”; the chilling “Chiller Alarm”; or the “Pump Alarm” which matters a lot in a Dutch building.
The one that intrigued me the most was inside the “White House.” This is what we called the marine’s booth, an armored steel shipping container box, outside the building, but inside the inner gates, and painted white. The alarm said “Duck and Cover” and had a bright red cable leading underground. One night, with a group of friends, we dared each other to pull it. Nobody dared. But I was in the building more than once when the fire alarm went off (for drills) and also when the ancient air-raid/attack alarm went off (at 4 a.m., and much more frightening). Every morning when I came in to the building, I would go into the control room and disable the beeping “intrusion” alarm. It was perplexing to me why the Americans had not just cut all the cables. Maybe they were afraid some bell would ring in Washington or Moscow, and start an international incident? Why was the building left, as it were, partially on alert? And yet, for all the alarms that were there, and still worked, there must have been many more that were removed. For example, there were no cameras left in the building, but you can bet that the Americans had plenty of them. Selective security. Selective silencing.
One day, as the building was being renovated for the public opening, a woman got stuck in one of the elevators. The noise from an old-fashioned bell ringing was tremendous; people were panicking. Grabbing the fireman’s key (which was hanging on the outside), I shoved it in the override switch, and turned it to BYP. I cannot remember how I knew that BYP meant bypass. Probably I saw it in some Hollywood film. And just like in a Hollywood film, it worked. Which felt very fortunate, as the vintage US-manufactured elevators “cannot” be repaired by Dutch workers. Or they probably could, but getting spare parts would involve importing period-piece cog-wheels from some long-shuttered Pennsylvanian steelworks.
The building was full of these anachronistic anomalies. Just as the cafeteria had served “real” American burgers and fries, so the building itself was full of “real” parts, imported from the United States, measured in inches, feet, or Fahrenheit. The upper floors (for higher-ranking officials) even had a dual electrical system—120-volt American plugs appear to have been a sign of status!
Some of the smoke alarms (which were not connected to the grid) started to beep after about 4 months. Their batteries were gradually dying. They were in obscure rooms which were hard to get to, and only beeped once every few minutes, so it took patience to track them down. Eventually I found a few, and disabled them. Later, that whole area was boarded up, due to safety reasons. I like to think that when they open it in 5 years, all the rooms will be beeping, in an insistent bird-like chorus—“Let us out! We can’t save you!”
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At first, it was difficult to access the building. The Americans had fortified the place, to the extent that there were only two possible ingresses. The keys were military-grade and illegal to duplicate. So every morning, on arrival, I went through a sort of gauntlet as follows:
Drive bike up handicapped ramp to back of building. Unlock padlock on huge steel gate. Bring bike inside; re-lock padlock. Unlock bullet-proof door to Marines’ post. Enter with bike. Lock door behind me. Park bike on side of room. Dial code on lock box. Remove special keys, and walk 53 steps through inner courtyard to bomb-proof blue door. Unlock blue door with gold key. Pull door (very heavy). Prop door open with rock. Walk back 53 steps to Marine post. Replace gold key in lock box. Scramble code. Walk back to blue door, go inside, kick rock out of the way, and shut door behind me. Walk through silver bomb-proof door and a regular wooden door to alarm room. Disable alarm. Press “up” button for 90 seconds to open steel gate in front of building. Turn on elevator bank 1. Walk back to lobby (22 steps). Walk upstairs (46 steps). Walk down corridor to end of hallway (38 steps). Push open bland door marked “no mobile devices.” (This always fooled people, who thought it was the end of the hallway.) Continue 18 more steps. Unlock my studio. Throw coat, keys, hat on floor. Make coffee.
After a few weeks, I got this whole process down to 9 min. And in a rush, I could do it in 7 min.
This unlocking, unpacking ritual, was sometimes lengthened by rain (the padlock was maddeningly slippery when wet), or shortened if my fellow artist had already opened the building for the day. I recorded it a few times, but the results were messy. All that fumbling for keys did not make for great audio. But as LaBelle (2015: 24) says, sound “makes explicit the intensity of territory.”
The ritual was cathartic. The focus needed on a bleary wintry morning to get the sequence correct, and not leave anything unlocked, helped to book-end my work, put my art between parentheses, shut out the outside world, as literally as metaphorically. From the former users we inherited a layer of fear, which was amplified by the building’s new manager: “don’t leave the doors open; don’t let anyone in; watch out for intruders, spies, thrill-seekers, graffiti artists, terrorists.” And were they really there, these murky figures, lurking around, trying to get in? Not really. Once the police were gone and the fences came down, everyone saw immediately that the building had lost its importance. Well, almost everyone.
One day, leaving the building, my locking ritual was interrupted by a man in a green T-shirt with what I took to be a Sri Lankan accent. He rushed through the gate, and grabbed me. I would have been frightened but he was much smaller than me, and himself seemed wildly scared. Holding me by the jacket, he begged to be let in, in broken English. Why? What for? I said, stalling for time, trying to marshal my thoughts. He hardly seemed a terrorist. Was he escaping someone? Almost—he wanted asylum. I explained that the Americans had gone, but my own American accent hardly made it a credible story, and he pleaded with me desperately, a long garbled string of stories which I could not follow. I started gently pushing him back towards the gate, then suddenly he leapt past me, and darted into the white guard house. This was getting serious. I had to get him out of there, either myself, or by calling the police.
I did not want him to be jailed or deported, so I tried to calm him down through the thick and dirty glass of the bullet-proof door. Not a great way to have a conversation. I had the key in my hand and could have entered, but then he would have retreated further into the courtyard, and I feared losing him in the parking area, where there were plenty of hiding spots. Eventually, I did persuade him that the Embassy had moved, and gave him instructions to find the new Embassy.
I highly doubt he got asylum. My anger goes out to whomever dropped him off in front of an abandoned building after some nightmarish 6-week journey, hiding in the back of a truck or worse.
Afterward, the other artists and I joked that we should issue our own passports and offer asylum for USD5000 to all seekers. Well, we did not. And there were no further incidents.
We were not attacked, and the only graffiti was that someone (probably an art student) spray-painted fuzzy white feet on the front steps. Two other incidents happened, which I did not witness. Both involved the type of thrill-seekers who (in every country) host parties in bunkers and catacombs. In a way, I do not blame them. If I had not been working in the embassy myself, I would have wanted to get in. And, quite astoundingly, it turned out to be very easy to do so. Bereft of its guards, fences, and cameras, the embassy building turned out to be a Swiss cheese full of holes. I did not attend the famous party where everyone apparently danced naked on the roof, but I wish I had.
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Ironically, the building seemed to instill in me a sort of paranoia, much like that which must have pursued the Americans. Yes, the building was built during the Cold War, and adapted to the age of terrorism. And there is no question that all the security apparatus surrounding me came to modify my own behavior.
The building was acting on my subconscious. It spoke, it vibrated, it sounded. It held “waves of physical resonance” (Toop, 2004: 106). And I listened. What was it trying to tell me? Was the physical structure manifesting its original role, as a welcoming center for American culture, with me, the accidental artist, being channeled into a role that the architect himself had hoped for? Was the building in its recent role, as a fortress, a sinister symbol of imperial power, a secret communications hub, acting on its helpless users?
I found myself caught between these two conflicting purposes. I tried to make my studio a place of welcoming, where I could play concerts and invite people, and serve them wine and snacks. But it was hard to exorcise the aura of fear which permeated the structure, and I experienced a weird type of synesthesia, as I began to conflate the visual and the audible.
“Even places that seem to function properly, like shopping malls and airport terminals, can only uphold that image by manipulating and conditioning the users and even more importantly, by excluding the ones that do not fit the ideal picture,” writes interior architect Hans Venhuizen (2017: 2). This question of borders is of crucial importance: the history of exclusion is also a manifestation of silence; and I found living amongst the detritus of the American security apparatus overwhelming, sickening.
After 4 months or so months in the building, I became ill. Shadowy crews of workmen (electricians, inspectors, and asbestos cleaners in their white pajamas and masks) roamed the hallways like ghosts. The anguish and anxiety of the situation made me physically sick. Unclear on my own role, unwilling to take on the security of the perimeter nor the contents, I felt responsible for my country’s political anxiety.
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I took a few weeks off, and stayed away.
When I came back, I had a transcendent experience. One thing the building lacks is poetry. It’s got stories, for sure, suppressed because they will remain silent, secrets. And the building has a history of listening and looking (eavesdropping, spying). But the interior spaces are mostly ugly and have all the artistry of 1980’s government offices. Florescent lights, brown carpet squares, and gray concrete walls make for a dull atmosphere. No poetry here.
So imagine my surprise one day walking down a dark carpeted corridor, when I noticed that the sides were lit with an eerie glow—little pyramids were shimmering on the white walls. At first I could not understand what was happening—each time I got close to one, it disappeared. I’m not a believer in the supernatural, but I was searching for an explanation. Furthermore, these fuzzy pyramids were full of movement—swaying and vibrating, almost 3D. The hall was completely silent. I knew no one else could be in the building. I opened one of the hallway doors, and there was just an empty room. Nobody there. But as I closed the door, the pyramid suddenly reappeared in the darkened hallway, and I realized that the room was acting like a camera obscura. The light outside was just the right angle—and it was a bright sunny day, unusual for The Hague. The trapezoidal view out the window was thus transformed, via round holes in the doors (emptied of their defense-department locks); and projected upside down and reversed on the concrete of the hallway walls. Trees waving in the wind made the images shimmer. Now, knowing what to look for, I walked up and down the corridors, examining each glowing anti-shadow with delight, trying to make out the inverted skyline of the Hague in miniature. I got out my camera to photograph the effect, but the photos did poor justice to the dancing grey-green pictures, and soon the light changed, and they faded away. Shadow and silence, (in)visible and inaudible, were mixed in a subtle synesthesia. I only saw them once more, a few weeks later, and then never again. Like Mayan temples, the building “spoke” the cosmos but once or twice a year.
For the rest, it was silent. When the workmen left, the building was fully abandoned to me and one other artist. And I began to listen even harder to the structure, the box of sounds which marked this territory. Not unrelatedly, the shadow of the former Iron Curtain is marked on the ground by different vegetation. Decades of being off-limits created a narrow micro-environment 12,500 km long, now called the European Green Belt. 1 The wilder, and more diverse, flora and fauna are thus also a different soundscape. It was the same with the abandoned embassy.
“Silence is never a neutral emptiness. It is the negative of sound we have heard beforehand or imagined, it is the product of a contrast” (Chion, 1994: 57).
My questions about silence are not only relevant to musicians. Composers, urban sociologists, engineers, and architects are concerned with some of the same practical and theoretical issues. I spoke extensively with Kees Went (see his piece elsewhere in this special section) who studies the public experience of urban soundscapes in Rotterdam from both an audio and architectural point of view. For him, as also for me, the visual and the audible can—and do—overlap.
At the former Embassy I also talked with a preacher 2 who felt that silence has been one of his most important topics in the last decade. He spoke of the social relevance of silence going far beyond meditation or mindfulness. And anyone who has experienced an anechoic chamber or a stay in a monastery learns that silence forces us to confront ourselves, our inner selves. As both John Cage (1961) and R. Murray Schafer (1993 [1969]) suggested, in the anechoic chamber our reflections are lost—we have no proof of our existence.
John Cage launched the silence debate with his legendary visit to the Harvard anechoic chamber, but he also focused it on questions of permission and artistic ingerance. I would argue that the listener must consider silence not just from a musical, but also architectural point of view. Questions of borders in public space are more and more urgent, as (especially) the urban sphere becomes more circumscribed and less free and people are pressured into silence (camera surveillance, stricter rules and police presence).
Musical silence in architecture has hardly been considered at all, except by a small group of artists, radio makers, and composers. The 60-year old ideas of Cage overwhelm the discussion, but critic Kyle Gann’s No Such Thing as Silence (2010) offers some brilliant potential jumping-off points, as does the work of LaBelle (2015, 2018) and Voegelin (2010), coming from the sound art and radio perspectives. Indeed Cage’s theories have worked their way into other fields, including that of international diplomacy: drawing on the language theories of Wittgenstein and the writings of John Cage, international relations and counter-terrorism expert Elisabeth Schweiger (2018) analyzes recent decisions of the International Court of Justice and their use of silence. The context becomes crucial as the stakes are high in their decisions. Silence can mean disapproval, tacit approval, acceptance, or complete disagreement, depending on the situation in which it is used. Silence is often used as an anti-language (Halliday, 1976: 570–584) or an expression of power.
Paradoxically, what Cage did to music is to destroy the myth of silence. Thanks to him, we understand there is no such thing as silence. Indeed one could posit that the term quiet is more apt than silence. This has led us to treat music differently, and to treat the world differently. Written in an analog world, the quiet piece did not foresee digital technology, which only later would confirm Cage’s theories: the presence of extremely widespread (in our pockets) and extremely sensitive recording devices has enabled us to hear to what an astonishing extent there is and can be no silence. On a macro basis, events such as the first detection of gravitational waves 3 show that our culture’s hearing of quiet things is continually improving, crossing time (billions of years), and space.
And yet, in the month following the Americans’ departure, the building was anything but silent. The metal radiators hissed and clanked day and night. The wind raced through open windows and blew trash along empty hallways. Plastic vertical blinds hissed and buzzed in the breeze. Water dripped in the bathrooms, and refrigerant hummed in the water fountains. Outside, a procession of city trucks laboriously restored the “no-man’s land” around the perimeter. The high steel fences, the concrete anti-tank blocks, all the trappings and traps of the post-9/11 US governmental landscape, were hoisted out and trucked away, to be replaced by 18th-century sidewalks of hand-laid herringbone bricks. And then a few weeks later, the bricks were ripped up to install new gas and electricity lines (remember, the city had no access to the sidewalks for two decades).
All this made a hell of a racket, encouraging me to build a sound-booth in a windowless closet. How else could I tape my radio shows 4 ? This podcasting booth was made from vintage sound-proofing materials I found on the backs of office doors, and around the former server banks in the basement. Everyone who sees it thinks I have discovered the CIA’s padded interrogation chamber. Not at all—it is a scrounge-art project, entirely self-made. And it works pretty well. Construction outside the building is long since completed, but on holidays, or when parades march past, I can record professional-quality audio, untroubled in my secret chamber.
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And then, a few months later, the building was opened to the public, and everything relaxed. The bars came off the windows, the rooms were repainted, and the ghosts were exorcised by groups of smiling tourists, snapping selfies. The paranoia is gone, although you can still find it in a few abandoned hallways in the basement or nooks and crannies on the roof. Now my studio is far more comfortable, furnished with a grand piano, moth-eaten oriental rugs, and an old telescope. The museum downstairs is noisy by day, quiet by night.
Like the bookworm and spy in Banville’s thriller, “I would sit in my flat on the top floor, reading, or listening to the gramophone—calm, reflective, sustained aloft, as it were, by the thronging silence peculiar to the spaces in which great art resides” (Banville, 1998: 309).
When I accidentally stumbled on these lines I laughed in recognition. I too was above it all, sustained by the silence, the music, and the cold war.
In a sense, my experience does say something about the human condition and our heavily industrialized and propagandized world. We are all living in constructions of someone else’s fabrication. We may not see the walls that surround us, and we may not hear the boundaries that enclose us, but they are there, and there is no question they modify our behavior in certain not so subtle ways.
So let’s not fool ourselves—no building is inherently silent, abandoned or not. No building could be. Watch and listen to your surroundings.
The silence may be speaking to you.