The New Castle Phonotope

LARP 7020-2022026

In 1681, a bell rang from the roof of the New Castle courthouse. People believed the sound traveled twelve miles. They drew a circle with that radius around the courthouse which ultimately became the boundary between Pennsylvania and Delaware. It clashed with nearby borders and set off decades of disputes which eventually required the survey that produced the Mason–Dixon Line. (The original story about the bell is not strictly true, but it works well as an acoustic myth.)

Throughout the day, maids, butlers, stable workers sustained the estate through cycles of cleaning, cooking, serving, caring for horses, and maintaining grounds. Their movements carried heat, sound, materials, and labor across interiors, service quarters and stables. After evening gatherings, their footsteps continued through dark hallways as they closed and secured the house, as the rhythms of labor shifted into temporary rest before beginning again at dawn.

Yalei Zhu Xiaoyou Guo

While the DuPont gunpowder mills along the Brandywine River generated heat, force, and mechanical power each day, these industrial energies also extended into the domestic landscape of Bellevue Estate. Here, the household functioned as its own machine, maintained through the repetitive movements of workers whose presence still haunts the site.

Yalei Zhu Xiaoyou Guo

Based on our speculative reimagining of the site’s history, Pete du Pont becomes President of the United States in 1988, transforming Bellevue State Park into a secondary presidential residence. Through speculative soundscape, the project imagines helicopters, motorcades, surveillance systems, protests, and media noise overtaking the estate’s former rhythms of leisure and domestic labor, revealing Bellevue as both a symbol of political power and a haunted Du Pont landscape.

Yalei Zhu Xiaoyou Guo

Our site boundary completes the full circle and contains everything within it, including many smaller sites for exploring overlaps between ecology, economy, politics, and daily habits. Historically, this area includes the Mason–Dixon Line and the Underground Railroad. It includes massive industrial sites such as DuPont, the Port of Wilmington, the Salem Nuclear Power Plant, and the refineries. It includes military sites such as Fort Delaware. It includes numerous marshes and wildlife reserves. It includes both the east and west coasts of the lower Delaware River. It also includes 1209 North Orange Street, Wilmington, a single address that serves as the registered agent for hundreds of thousands of corporations.

Xiaoyou Guo Yalei Zhu

Daily and yearly cycle of Eleutherian Mills

Xiaoyou Guo Yalei Zhu

This studio looks at the repeating cycles of ecology, economy, and culture that give shape to time and space in a landscape. It proposes sound-based methods to analyze, and design, these cycles and the soundscapes they produce. Throughout the semester, we will use the idea of the phonotope—a sonic space formed by a community over time—to explore past, present, and future experiences of a changing landscape.