Architectural Design 5: Site Analysis and Folie Design

This week we went back to the Howard Smith Wharves site to gather some more insight into the location of our Folie. We had decided that we would use the area under the bridge for multiple reasons, some of these being the fact that it was high enough to resist flooding and had a great view! But more than that, the site has a unique sound quality to it – something we recognised on our first visit and something we investigated more on our second.

I took multiple sound recordings at the site, and from here produced visualisations to match the sound patterns (using VLC media player).

This is the ‘Goom’ visualisation pattern. It looks like a load of colour and is quite hard to make sense of.

This is the ‘Scope’ pattern. This is perhaps the most recognisable form of sound wave visualisation.

The second last pattern is the ‘Spectrometer’. This pattern reminds me of ripples in a pond, although the sound that produced it does not sound anything like a pond!!!

This is the ‘spectrum’ visualisation pattern. This is reasonably self-explanatory: it looks like a blocky wave form, and reminds me of sound as visualised on an old music player my dad had. Perhaps inspiration for the Folie?

From these sound visualisations, I decided to make a few rough sketches of how sound waves could translate into a Folie. Would the sound waves inform the form, or the way in which people interact with the space, or both?