Jeffrey Sipprell

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February 10, 2006

Synesthesia - Playing with Felt

Synesthesia: Sound and Vision is a unique course that is being taught by Jason Payne and Heather Roberge of GNUForm (who incidentally are an entrant in this year's PS 1 Competition) as a design build project involving the school's, currently derelict, auditorium in which we are to create a visually and auditory pleasing solution. The space is a completely stripped concrete box that is approximately 40' X 65', which gives us a reverberation time of approximately 3 seconds. As you can imagine, lectures in the space are at times unbearable - particulary ones that are less attended (the chairs are cheap hard plastic so they so little acoustically).

Our goal is to get the reverberation time down to one second within a budget of $20,000. Now you can probably imagine why the school is offering this as a design build course - the only thing we can hope to do is pour all of our money into materials and do the labor ourselves. So we've got to design a solution that's cheap and can be installed with not too much professional expertise. Now for the final wrinkle - the fire marshal has demanded that we only use Class A fire rated materials. So anything that's even slightly synthetic is out the window. And we're also limited to what has been tested already by the state of California since the process by which to submit a new material for review would take ages.

So, where does that leave us? Natural Wool Felt. There were two other schemes that also tested a burlap curtain and a perforated hard surface scheme, but ultimately the combination of cost, installation, and natural fiber only left us with one alternative. Now, you've probably got a few pictures in your mind of what this felt looks like - let me stop you right there. We're limited to two colors - slightly off white and medium gray. Not exactly stirring the visual senses here. And we've got no money to do anything electrically, so we can only play with form, scale, and variation.

GNUForm was already working with felt through the summer (it was originally their project) in the form of laser cut squares that were hung to form sunspended flowers. These flowers were then arrayed across the room to form an undulating ceiling, while the walls were treated entirely with homasote.

Unfortunately the scheme didn't work within the budget and the application of hard surfaces to all walls didn't do anything acoustically. So beginning in January, myself and nine other students, began to looks at other ways to use the felt in a more comprehensive scheme that would cover both ceiling and wall. Some of my group's initial studies into the way the material could be manipulated can be seen below:

Study A
Study B
Study C
Study D
Study E
Study F
Study G

This ultimately led to a wall elevation of:

Elevation 1
Elevation 2

Unfortunately other studies into pinching strips of felt were chosen over the slitting and pinching that our group was interested in. Here's a couple pics of the ceiling system:

Ceiling 1
Ceiling 2

And a few pics of the other wall study (the second one is the one we are going with):

Alt Study 1
Alt Study 2

This weekend we're trying to meld the schemes together a little bit better in a way that is less homogenous. I'll post some pics of how that goes.

Posted by jsipprell at February 10, 2006 3:29 PM

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