Sensory Playscape • A Sound-driven YMCA
MIT 2020, 4.152 Architectural Core 2 | Instructor: Kyle Coburn | Individual Design Project
YMCA’s design has been historically dominantly focused on visual perception and body movement. Auditory perception in architectural design has been significantly neglected. My project, Sensory Playscape, explores how immaterial sound can be the driven force in architectural creation and activate multi-sensory playing experience and unconventional interaction.
In the 17th century, German scholar and polymath Athanasius Kircher documented a series of sound experiments ranging from the talking statues which can reproduce whispers from the square, amplifiers and conductors of sound across the building, to the elliptical room in which elliptically shaped ceilings transmit and reinforce the voice. The geometric shape of space has great influence on acoustic behavior.
Acoustic Agenda - Programmatic Study
Sound-driven Design Exploration
Swimming pool, basketball court, running track, and sauna room, just to name a few, have very unique auditory characteristics. I collected the sound pieces for various activities in YMCA, and conducted sound analysis in terms of loudness, reverberation time, and signal/noise ratio. This metrics for sound is chosen to incorporate the individual position, existing environmental setting as well as embedded message in order to capture the sound’s spatial expression.
Without the space, the sound would be weak in intensity and expression. Space is part of the auditory experience; it adds strength and reverberation and makes the sound spatial. Therefore, based on my research on architectural acoustics, I came up with a catalogue of single- and double-node surface, and volume strategies for acoustic construct in space.
Play Spectrum, from Man, Play and Games, 1961, by Roger Caillois
In response to the site condition between noisy urban edges and tranquil riverscape, a sound funnel is shaped in the middle of the site to create auditory threshold. The Boolean volumetric operation was utilized inside and outside the massing to capture, contain, amplify, and connect sound perception.
The program adjacency associated with social relationship in plan and section is considered to make strategic amplified, dampened, shared/coupled, and muted auditory experience. Day care and swimming pool share the same elliptic roof can create auditory connection between parents and their children. This diagram shows how various sound intensity and reverberation time interact in YMCA.
This rendering of basketball court on the ground floor occupying an ellipsoidal space shows people on the second floor perceive amplified sound contained in basketball court.
The open gymnasium on the second floor demonstrates the interplay of sound-driven volumes and how sound-driven surface are adaptive to diverse playing experience, including sitting and resting.
The detailed sections demonstrate how structural system and wall thickness come into play and be able to engage with auditory experiences curation. Strategic position of diffused surfaces creates nonechoic and muted auditory experience. Listening channels and sound chambers across rooms and floors allow people to share auditory connection in space without actually seeing each other. The sound gallery and wind chime chamber on the second floor prioritize auditory perception and deemphasize other senses also enrich the programmatic possibilities.
Sensory Playscape, the sound-driven YMCA, therefore activates multi-sensory playing experience and unconventional interaction.
