Acoustically Responsive Habitation for Extreme Environments

@ Isle of Skye & Cairngorms Highlands, Scotland, UK

In collaboration with:
The Royal Danish Academy Architecture and Extreme Environments

Thank you to David Garcia, without whom this would not be possible.
Thank you to my amazing committee - Oli de Weck, Katya Arquilla, and Lauren Landon - for your support.
Thank you to my undergraduate students, Amy (Yihong) Chen and Crys Tang, for your hard work.
Thank you to Henry Glogau and Aleksander Guldager Kongshaug for your insights, encouragement, and camaraderie.
Thank you to Bill McKenna for your help with and companionship during fabrication.
Thank you to Amy DuFault of Southeastern New England Fibershed and Diana Wickman of Peterson Farm for sharing with me the wonderful world of wool.

In extreme environments, compounding stressors including isolation, reduced mobility, and resource constraints create challenging psychological conditions. In particular, sensory monotony and deprivation are two risks salient in spaceflight that can be examined in an analogous Earth context. This project explores how local and natural materials can be modularly integrated into an existing architecture to provide dynamic acoustic insulation controllable by the occupant.

Origami (glide-reflection fold) panels made with beeswax treated canvas are stuffed with waste wool sourced from local farms. Winter Scotland conditions provide a realistic and operationally challenging environment for immersive fieldwork. Several locations were chosen for short three-day expeditions to limit the operational complexity while maximizing the diversity of landscapes, soundscapes, and environmental conditions.

BEHAVIORAL HEALTH MONITORING

To demonstrate and pilot test an experimental protocol, the project will be deployed at three distinct locations within Scotland. Short, three-night stays (aka protocols) provide a balance between manageable logistics, adhering to Scottish public camping laws, and adequate physiological & psychological challenges. Throughout each protocol, the following data are collected:

Sleep architecture: duration, onset, subjective quality, and amount of time in REM, light, and deep sleep
Profile of Mood States (POMS)
Heart rate and heart rate variability
Energy level (objective, from HRV, stress, and activity)
Meta-cognition of energy level (differences between perceived and actual energy levels)
Fieldnotes & journal entries
Environmental data (sunrise/set, temperature, relative humidity)

This study has been approved by the MIT IRB (COUHES)

GEOMETRY, MATERIALS, SCALE

Initial swatches centered around ideating on three dimensional structures built from flat, modular surfaces. Due to volume and mass constraints of flying from the USA to Scotland on a passenger plane, collapsible/expandable mechanisms were of particular interest. Acoustic panels that featured constrasting materials (e.g., acrylic and sound blankets) were considered, paired with flipping mechanisms such as the ‘hexaflexagon’ fold.

I wanted to emphasize the equilateral triangle in the geometry ideation to echo the global geometry of the icosidodecahedral dome. Choosing a modular basis reduces fabrication and construction complexity, and origami was illuminated as a promising option due to its symmetry, inherent foldability/expandability, and structural integrity. However, scaling up origami is not an easy feat. Weight constains most structurally rigid materials. The fabrication complexity tradeoff of folding a single sheet of material vs. creating joints and hinges to support less rigid materials was also considered. Ultimately, the glide-reflection fold was chosen for its structural integrity, ability to create dome-like shapes, and ease of packing due to a flat linear folded state.

The folds create three-dimensional structures reminiscent of acoustic foam, maximizing surfaces for scattering and attenuating sound. The overlapping folds on the interior create pockets that allow loose wool to be stuffed, providing added structural integrity and acoustic insulation. Tests using quilt batting and detached triangular panels proved too challenging to construct at full scale due to the problems with adhering wool to cardstock and lack of structural stability and integrity.

After getting connected to Amy DuFault, who runs the Southeastern New England Fibershed, the labor intensive processing of wool was made apparent. The journey from raw wool to treated wool was one step, but a much bigger push is from loose wool to a felted or spun product. Therefore, a solution that would allow loose wool, as opposed to quilting, to be utilized would be a preferable solution.

Waxed canvas maintains the manuverability of fabric (foldability, ability to be held in tension, puncturability) while providing stiffness and added plastic deformation. Here, I am using 16.5oz beeswax treated canvas (12oz untreated) from Sailrite (Columbia City, IN). As with any fabric that is used in larger-than-human-scale projects, width becomes an informing factor in the design and fabrication processes. This fabric comes in 58 inch wide rolls, constraining the largest dimension of a single sheet to be 58” by X”. While not without its limitations, waxed canvas ultimately won out against acrylic, poly sheeting, wool batting, knitted textile, acoustic foam, wood veneer, aluminum, and cardboard along the dimensions of weight, durability, and points of failure.

The design rapidly evolved while scaling up. Two scaling parameters were 1) the overall size of the panels and 2) the ratio of the folds to the total length, which determines the size of the pockets. Taking advantage of the Origami Simulator (this fold is tesselations - waterbomb) along with small-scale rapid fabrication with paper, we realized that the density of the pockets determine the global behavior and curvature. Keeping curvature relatively constant to match with the interior curvature of the dome tent, either panel size would have to decrease (thus adding more panels overall to cover the interior) or the pocket size would have to increase (thus creating more structural instability). Through testing combinations of these two scaling parameters from 1:10 to 1:1 scale, it became apparent that the maximum desired dimension (flat sheet measuring 58”x87”) could not support itself, and the self-weight stretched out the pockets so that no wool could be stuffed inside. A smaller dimension was then chosen, fabricating from 40”x40” and 40”48” flat sheets, where the pockets are 8”x8”.

LABOR, PATINA, RITUAL

Fabrication of and with textiles are, for the most part, manual processes. Waxed canvas provides affordances for patina and the visualization of labor through the discoloration and softening of the wax with pressure, folds, and warmth. Each panel is measured, cut, and folded by hand - an incredibly labor intensive but meditative process that allows hands to shape the shelter they occupy. Stuffing each panel with wool is a ritual, akin to plastering the interior of a house with mud or smoothing snow onto ice blocks. As each panel is folded, unfolded, tied, flexed, creased, stuffed - the patina and wear begins to color the panels, forming a memory of the way this architecture is transformed to cater to the occupants.

LOCAL COLLABORATIONS

This project explores the intricacies of sheep and wool; its economics and inefficiencies; its misunderstandings and beauty. Wool is a natural material with amazing properties: antimicrobial, hypo-allergenic, moisture wicking, flame retardant, stain/odor resistant, durable, insulating (even when wet), and biodegradable. Yet, so much of wool goes to waste each year, due to burdensome logistics to transform it into a usable state (skirting, scouring, sorting, carding) and structure (spinning, felting), economic deincentivization due to the low market price of the material, and patterning inefficiencies from felting/knitting mills that produce textiles.

“I mean, we think about shearing [the wool off our sheep] as part of our husbandary costs. Then we sell it at-price, and it costs us $10 per head [of sheep] so that’s what we charge,”

Diana, who runs Peterson Farm with her farm partner, Simon, explained.

The New England area boasts a rich history of sheep farming, wool milling, and textile fabrication. In collaboration with the Southeastern New England Fibershed (Amy DuFault) and Peterson Farms (Diana Wickman), we are exploring how waste wool can be repurposed. Waste wool is a problem worldwide. All wool needs to be graded by a certified board before its value is determined. In the UK in 2022, the British Wool Board paid an average of 36.4 pence per kilo of wool, which cannot cover even the cost of shearing and transport for the wool to be graded [Mundinger, 2024][British Wool Board 2022]. Many farmers burn, toss, or indefinitely store their wool. As Diana said to me:

“If you see anyone with sheep, they definitely have a barn full of waste wool lying around.”