"Every institution is a kind of metaphysics." — Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)
Das Pneumatische Institut für Höhere Resonanzstudien occupies the elevated northern edge of Das Resonanzviertel in the manner of all academic institutions that have convinced themselves their elevation is earned: with the quiet confidence of stone. Its facade is severe neoclassical, limestone ashlar dressed in the manner of Schinkel's Berlin civic buildings — the Altes Museum's colonnaded authority translated into a building that smells, on warm Tuesdays, of rendered fat and serious scholarship. Inside, the Institut's great lecture halls are fitted with a system of resonance panels — polished mahogany baffles mounted at precise acoustic angles — designed to capture, amplify, and analyze Pneumatik emissions produced by students during seminar. The chairs are upholstered in a dark leather that does not show stains. The windows look north, away from the market. Hildegard Pneum, the Institut's senior Pneumatik-Stenographin and Kanalakustikerin, has spent eleven years developing a notation...
From the lore of Flatulence as Logos: The Pneumatic Language of the Disenfranchised.