ELASTOMER WALL SPRING 2011, CED: UC BERKELEY
ARCH 269: NATURE AND ELASTOMERS TUTOR: M. PAZ GUTIERREZ
This was a graduate research seminar project, completed as a group of 10.
Exhibited at California Academy of Sciences, ‘Design by Nature’, August - September 2011.
Can acoustic spaces be reconfigured through material behaviour alone? Using modular elastomer components, this project proposes an acoustically responsive wall system with a dynamic membrane to modify acoustic environments. Though made up of individual modules, the wall system aims to modify acoustic spaces by functioning as a continuous whole. Fixed to a structure with a double-curvature for stability and controlled by servo motors connected to a microphone, the membrane deforms from input by a fast fourier transform to reflect the dominant frequency waveforms within a space. This is only gestural as a visualisation tool though - the wall could be programmed to behave in any number of ways.