The pocket Park / Sound Wall project was done by myself and Kevin Kaputsiak. Together, along with Tug Collective: Gaelyn Aguilar, Gustavo Aguilar, we attempted to create a sustainable and low-impact designed structure in order to create a small space where students and passer-bys can have a bit of solitude and nature in an area where that experience is not readily available.
Mission Statement
To research and implement the building of a “Pocket Park” utilizing sound reducing walls, tubes, and other low-impact and sustainable building techniques. This park is a project that is intended to spark interest and questions around urban green space, the attempt to bring silence into noisy urban settings and the effects of noise found in urban areas, especially ones near busy roadways, on our health.
Goals
Analyze and assess the level of noise pollution generated by Huron Church.
Discover ways of lessening this pollution through the use of found materials to construct sustainable low-impact structures.
Give suggestions for further revisions to help continue the project and implement these designs.
“Green Corridor” Students at the University of Windsor: Stephen Surlin, Kevin Kaputsiak
Tug Collective: Gaelyn Aguilar, Gustavo Aguilar
Waddle & Daub from Stephen Surlin on Vimeo.
This is time-lapse documentation of the waddle and daub process which is described below. The project was for the course Green Corridor (greencorrior.ca) at the University of Windsor in Ontario. The waddle & daub is needed to create “sound walls” that can muffle the sound of the NAFTA super highway, Huron Church Road, that is right behind my school and is also the busiest border crossing in Canada with millions of trucks traversing the border each year.
The construction of the sound wall needed to address the amount of sound that can be absorbed or reflected by each building method. The density of the material is important, especially to reduce the amount of low-frequency noise.
Based on the research inspired by Tug Collective we were able to focus on low-impact and sustainable design. The publications, Design Like You Give A Damn and Design For The Other 90%. These publications focus on the use of local materials and building techniques. These ideologies mixed with the use of the pallets will hopefully begin a dialogue with the public and concepts that correspond with global trade, shelter, the use of materials and the correlation between design and the state of citizens around the world, all concepts that are becoming more and more important as “Free Trade” and globalization continue to bring distant places into an interlocking network.
After we moved through several stages of research we came to a method referred to as wattle and daub, a medieval building method used to build houses in regions across Europe. Wattle refers to the weaving of branch like materials between posts, this structure is then covered in daub, which is a mixture of clay, sand, straw and water. This mixture is then mixed with shovels and by walking all over it, as it was done back in the 1500s, then straw is added to the mixture in order to make it strong and sticky enough to put it on the waddle.
- The space by the Lebel School Of Arts where the park/wall can be.
- The materials we salvaged in order to make the pallet based walls.
- We attempted to create the wall in several styles.
- Luckily we were able to source large amounts of material and have it delivered by the generous people over at PCR Contractors, who were working near by on the new engineering building.
- Clay, straw, sand, dirt, grass and twigs to make the daub.
- A pallet with the waddling on it, ready to be daubbed.
- After leaving the work site for a day, when I returned, a rabbit was resting in the pallet structure. Seems like a good sign for what we are trying to create, green and sustainable structures.
- Another pallet after being daubbed.
- The finished Sound Wall/Pocket Park
- Doing some recordings for the sound analysis.
- The analysis of the fireld recordings, done in Logic.
Analysis 1 – Various recordings of the surrounding areas.
Analysis 2 – Recording in front and behind wall to determine change.
Click on the picture to the left to view and/or download the PDF version of the “Sound Wall – Pocket Park Legacy Report“. A document we are required to complete at the end of our course in Green Corridor.
