Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project

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Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project

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  • Project Name: Shelled Audiokinesis
  • Student Name: Esin Ilay San
  • Softwares/Plugins: Rhinoceros 3D , Adobe Photoshop , Adobe Illustrator
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Excerpt: ‘Shelled Audiokinesis’ is a Bachelor’s Design Project by Esin Ilay San form the ‘Pratt Institute School of Architecture.’ The project aims to create a place of solace within an industrial landscape by reframing how sound and space are experienced. Through architectural manipulation of enclosure, material, and natural forces, the design filters industrial noise while amplifying natural sound, allowing nature and architecture to collaboratively shape a sensory, contemplative environment that challenges boundaries between the built and natural realms.

Introduction: The design prompts a place of solace and respite in the path of Newtown’s Creek, a heavily industrialized tributary, through an auditory observatory. The program is facilitated through a manipulation of sensory experience—an interplay of sound deprivation and amplification through the ambiguity of spatial enclosure.

Arched shells stagger and layer to create a channel of silent observation. Their walls host dense plant life, an insulative buffer to incoming sound. The systematic slits in the hinged panels allow natural wind flow, preventing shuttering. The convex exterior of the roof modules bounces off industrial sound, while their concave interior contains the sound generated within the architectural space. This further asserts the premise of limiting industrial sounds while emphasizing natural sounds, allowing architecture to define the natural experience. 

The site is carved lower into a path of partial enclosures. In two pockets, the shelled panels break into the lowered ground, allowing sound from the creek to enter this auditory canal while continuing to nullify industrial sound. The permeation of this natural force into the soundscape of the design breaks the boundaries between the architecture and nature, allowing natural forces to design the architectural experience.

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Site Context

Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Neighboring Facility (Large Machinery And Movement)
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Neighboring Facility (Corporate/Nonresidential, Product Transport) | Neighboring Facility (Metal Junkyard, Recycling Port)

Newtown’s Creek is a tributary of the East River located in Brooklyn, New York. The site lies on the south end of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk. The existing condition of the site contradicts its program severely; the intention of a “nature walk” is resisted through excessive concrete, steel, and processed gravel. The architecture is formed in an objection to the industrialized materials present on-site. Directly adjacent to the park is a metal recycling facility as well as a water treatment plant. Both industries (with accompanying transportation docks) bring in excessive industrial noise. Thus, the design process of this project was largely defined by the site’s intense noise pollution.

Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Plant Life On Site Observed #1 — Small Berries | Plant Life On Site Observed #2 — Small Berries
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Plant Life On Site Observed #3 — Dense, Dry Shrubury | Materials On Site Observed, Plaster And Steel Gates/Fences.

During early visits, industrial sound levels were assessed by average decibel measurement for 1 minute. These results informed the arrangement of the modules and the method for sound deprivation, as well as the arched design of the roofs. The study showed that the sound pollution levels were highest at the center of the site, where no plants existed, at the edge closest to the water. In contradiction, where plant life bordered the site, the decibel levels were lower. Based on these findings, the space was designed to be centralized, targeting regions with higher sound levels. The project’s program formed around dampening industrial noise pollutants through the architecture and natural forces.

Design Process

The site was documented through a process of data analysis and observation. The existing plant life on the site was dense and highly resilient to the harsh weather and dry conditions. The decibel readings on noise pollution were significantly lower when standing behind these planted regions, resulting in the use of dense plants such as Hedera Ivy or a Climbing Hydrangea in the design. The octahedron shape of the panels were contrived from existing geometries on the site; however, it does not intend to replicate the same visual environment. The shells are made of wood, each panel from a translucent glass that shields the interior from harsh sites of the junkyard, bathing the interior with a soft indirect glow. The panels connect in systems of seven and hinge to generate a gentle curve. They layer organically, the geometry of architecture undoubted, yet somewhat ambiguous in its border with nature. The double panelling on the shell walls hosts plant growth within the vessel, responding to the effective conditions observed. The growth and said effectiveness, however, are left to the unpredictability of nature. 

Through careful site analysis, existing plant life and water features were integrated into the architecture to function as natural buffers against industrial sound.

Final Outcome

Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
The horizontal flow of space is transformed to a vertical blurring of boundaries. Where a fluidity exists beside us is further instituted above and below us, not through a growth and encroaching of architectural structures, but through the architecture of nature’s forces. Swallowed by uncontrollable forces, the remaining ground floats across its surface delicately.
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Without reservations in defining sight, and nature and the structure usurp one another, hosting an ambiguity of transition from the
two primary spatial zones.

Shelled Audiokinesis investigates the ambiguity of the boundary between nature and architecture through sound and spatial flow. A geometric system fluctuates organically between moments of spatial and auditory enclosure, blurring distinctions between the natural and the constructed.

Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Water rises, like an extension of the ground, it reflects in stillness,
yet strikes tensions in consuming the ground. The architecture is submerged, our choices within the architecture alter. Water defines our autonomy.
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Final Model
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Final Model

Spatial enclosure is disrupted as a translucent framework emerges from the ground, then reasserted through the layering of panels and terrain. Similarly, auditory enclosure is dissolved along the lower path, where the sound of moving water permeates the space, and reestablished along the upper path, where buffered, isolative conditions contain sound.

Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Final Model
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Final Model
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Final Model

No fixed boundary exists between nature and enclosed architectural space. Natural elements—water and plant life—are granted autonomy to define the architecture itself: vegetation grows to muffle sound, while water acts to amplify it. The degree to which these effects occur is left to the unpredictability of natural processes. This tension establishes a balance between architecture’s power to shape nature and nature’s capacity to reshape architecture, experienced through sensory ambiguity and fluctuating enclosure.

Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Final Model
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Final Model

Nature consumes what we create, just as we consume nature in the act of creation.

Conclusion: Ultimately, the project explores the evolving boundary between the antecedent and the contrived through time and sound.

[This Academic Project has been published with text and images submitted by the student]

Site Context

Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project

Final Outcome

Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project
Shelled Audiokinesis: Sensory Architecture and Acoustic Urban Design at Newtown Creek | Bachelor’s Design Project

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