In July 2021, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg celebrated its acoustic perfection again. The concert hall, designed by Herzog & de Meuron with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, uses 10,000 individually milled gypsum fibre panels to shape how sound moves through the room. Each panel is unique. The building cost €866 million and took sixteen years. Every surface was calculated to deliver sound to a hearing ear with extraordinary precision. Toyota told The Guardian in 2017 that he wanted the room to feel “like being inside an instrument.” I read that sentence from my wheelchair in a flat where I can feel the bass from my neighbour’s stereo through the floorboards, and I thought: you already know sound travels through surfaces. You just chose to optimize for one receptor.
Five thousand kilometres east, in a different room, Hansel Bauman was working on something that starts from the opposite premise. Bauman, the architect behind DeafSpace at Gallaudet University, designed spaces where light, vibration, spatial geometry, and sightlines carry meaning. The hallways are wider so signers can walk and talk. The walls use colours that contrast with skin tone. The floors transmit footsteps you feel before you see anyone approach. Bauman didn’t build for the absence of hearing. He built for the presence of everything else.
Two buildings. One celebrated worldwide, the other barely discussed outside disability and Deaf studies circles. The cost difference is staggering. The attention difference is worse.
You might say: the Elbphilharmonie is a concert hall. Of course it optimizes for hearing. That’s the point. And yes — that is the point. The question is why nobody notices it as a choice. Toyota’s 10,000 panels are treated as engineering. Bauman’s spatial decisions are treated as accommodation. The concert hall is architecture. The Deaf university is special needs. The vocabulary does the work before anyone examines what was actually built.
Here is what I mean. In August 2023, I attended a panel on inclusive venue design in Rotterdam. An acoustician — I’ll call her what she called herself, “a sound architect” — presented slides of waveform modelling for a new performing arts centre. Thirty-seven minutes of detailed analysis of reverberation time, frequency response, absorption coefficients. Someone asked about hearing loops. She said they’d be installed “to standard.” Someone asked about Deaf audiences. She paused. “Well,” she said, “they wouldn’t really be the target demographic, would they?” She meant it kindly. That was the worst part.
The target demographic. A performing arts venue — publicly funded, built on public land, marketed as a civic space — and the architect who designed its sonic environment could say, without embarrassment, that Deaf people were not the target demographic. She wasn’t being cruel. She was being accurate. The brief never mentioned them. The procurement documents never required it. The accessibility review checked for hearing loops and wheelchair spaces and called it done.
This is where the economics matter. Toyota’s gypsum panels for the Elbphilharmonie cost millions in custom milling. Nobody questioned whether shaping sound for hearing audiences was worth the budget. Bauman’s work at Gallaudet — wider corridors, considered lighting, vibrational flooring — costs a fraction of that. Hansel Bauman and Dirksen Bauman, along with Joseph Murray, developed the concept of Deaf Gain, which reframes deafness not as loss but as a distinct perceptual orientation that generates knowledge hearing culture doesn’t have. Spatial knowledge. Vibrational literacy. Visual acuity that hearing people never develop because they don’t need to.
Deaf Gain is not a metaphor. It is a design methodology. And it produces better buildings for everyone. Wider corridors help wheelchair users. Vibrational feedback helps people with low vision. Good lighting helps everyone over fifty. The rooms Bauman designed are not “special.” They are more literate about how bodies actually occupy space.
I know this in my skeleton. I have sat in concert halls where the sound was supposedly transcendent and felt nothing but the hum of the ventilation system through my wheel rims. I have also sat in a community hall in Brixton in December 2022 where a Deaf-led theatre company performed with bass transducers built into the seating, and I felt the entire performance through my chest and my palms and the base of my spine. The room was not acoustically “perfect.” It was alive in more directions than one.
The performing arts industry spends extraordinary sums shaping rooms for a single sensory channel and then calls the result universal. Mike Oliver distinguished between impairment and disability in 1983 — the body is one thing, the barrier is another. The concert hall’s barrier is not that Deaf people cannot hear. The barrier is that the architect never imagined them as present.
Sunaura Taylor wrote that the category of “normal” does the heaviest lifting in deciding who counts. In acoustic design, “normal” means: has ears, uses them in the expected way, sits still, receives. The room is built for a listener who does not move, does not sign, does not feel sound through bone and wood and steel. That listener is the blueprint. Everyone else is an afterthought the procurement cycle calls “inclusive provision.”
Toyota’s 10,000 panels face outward, each one a different shape, tuned to the same kind of ear.
This article was inspired by Building for Sound: The Acoustics of the New Hop - Dartmouth from news.google.com.