Sara El Samman

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France (residence), Lebanon (citizenship) °1997
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Sara El Samman is a Lebanese landscape architect, agricultural engineer and multi-disciplinary artist based in Paris. Her work focuses on developing soundscape oriented approaches to city design and on raising awareness on the importance of the acoustic dimension when working on urban landscape projects.

 

After obtaining her bachelor degrees in landscape architecture and agricultural engineering from AUB (American University of Beirut), Sara obtained her masters degree in landscape design at ESAJ (Ecole de la transition écologique). During her studies, she developed the notion of the sonic/white infrastructure that allows for sound to be used as a tool for designing cities.

 

In addition to her research and projects in landscape architecture, Sara’s artwork explores the relationship between the visual and the non-visible, through different media, digital and traditional.

 

She is currently working as a landscape architect at AXP Urbicus, an urban design studio in Versailles, while pursuing in parallel her research in acoustic design and her artistic career as an illustrator and sound artist.

research

research expositions

  • White/acoustic infrastructure: a crucial tool for the transition to an environmentally sustainable future in urban areas: The case of Paris La Defense, a modern district in dissonance (2022) author(s): Sara El Samman published in: Research Catalogue
    The national lockdown due to COVID-19 abruptly cut down on human activity in cities, and enabled urban dwellers to notice nature’s comeback through birdsong: It has shown that today’s urban environment is in acoustic imbalance. My research aims to provide an overview on how soundscapes fit into the landscape design process, and to explore the notion of white/sonic infrastructure in order to give a tangible tool for landscape architects to read landscapes with their ears and design acoustically sensible places for all living beings. Sound informs the design process not simply by reducing unwanted noise but by encouraging a sound-considered city design approach. This adopted strategy would entail the extraction and reinterpretation of sonic cues as blueprints for the reshaping of the space and the transformation of the soundscape experience for users and nature alike. The paper applies all of its findings on Paris La Defense, the biggest business district in Europe, who’s current morphology, within the ring of noise that is the “Boulevard circulaire”, dissociates it from its territory creating acoustic and physical discontinuities. A study of the flows that animate the site along with its morphology helped me extract the multiple sonotopes (sonic biotopes) that shape the acoustic space of the district. Sound maps were created and a white infrastructure strategy was furthermore developed. The article develops an elaborate method that could help translate a soundscape vision into concrete landscape design actions and proposes an approach to sonic continuities on large and local scales. White infrastructure affords the additional dimension necessary to conceive the landscape and to create space for the non-human, for the human, and for the dialogue between them. The notion of eco-acoustic design contributes to shaping a non-anthropocentric city that is considerate of all living things and therefore is crucial to designing ecological urban ecosystems.
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