ABSTRACT
Based on fieldwork among occupants of multi-storey housing in Denmark, as well as professionals from the Danish building and housing sectors, this chapter explores the account of one occupant, Liva, and how she experiences faint sounds made by her neighbours as disturbing noise. It examines how she attempts to handle the nuisance, and it engages the perspectives of an architect, an acoustician, and an engineer as a way of characterizing the material properties of the wall. It lays out a binary categorization of issues of neighbour noise as the fault of either the occupant or of the building, and suggests a third position, which investigates the similarities and entanglements between Liva and the wall, showing how each shapes the other. Whereas a typical anthropological analysis would focus on the occupant, and an architectural one on the built environment, the third position explored in this chapter occupies the space between them, where architectural anthropology resides. This position offers both disciplines the opportunity to benefit from their mutual entanglement and to re-emerge in new forms.
