Time for another day in the life for this design hack wannabe. This one is for a freeway sound wall somewhere out in the stick at Caroline Springs, which is kinda funny since the price of petrol will invalidate their choice of lifestyle and isolate them from the city. Probably just as well I guess. Anyone who chooses to live the 'dream' has to pay the price somehow.
The idea of a sound wall is really a lot more sculptural than architectural in the sense of designing a tangible building with defined functions and the like which made this one a bit harder to pull off. A couple of people in my group began experimenting with stationary like wire, pins and paper which yielded some pretty cool looking results, but I took my inspiration from the experiences of being inside a moving vehicle, in particular physics related components like speed, time, acceleration, distance and relativity.
The first three are kind of self explanatory and closely linked, but I considered distance more in terms of position away from the point of view, especially in regards to objects situated far away. This leads on to relativity which for the purposes of this argument is tied to the idea of relative motion between objects and the perceived motion. For example watching a passing train speed by a platform is completely different from being on the train in how you view the world. Lying at night watching the stars cross the sky represents not just the relative orbits of the two bodies, but the rotation of the Earth's surface as well.
After a while I came to a kind of arrangement involving lots of periscopes by evoking the power of the concepts of time and relativity. The idea being that while stuck on the highway you could look into the 'future' by peering into the periscope and seeing what the world is like on the other side, and vice versa. They would be colour coded so you could see which periscope leads where, preventing confusion and making the experience more tangible than using something like a wired television system. At the time I felt it had to possess a certain degree of physicality to it, otherwise it'd just be another kind of electronic contraption.
Hopefully that makes sense to you through the awesome power of words because it requires extra effort to scan sketches and even then I'm not sure they'd make much sense unless you saw them though my eyes. And no, I'm not going to gouge out my eyes and lend them to you via some sort of weird time share arrangement. So for now words will have to do.
Eventually it did get a bit too complicated and there were a number of small problems creeping in here and there. For example, mirrors don't work too well when you're speeding at 100 kph down the freeway. And it's an awful lot of the same thing over and over again for an entire kilometre. Granted, it's all over quite quick at speed, but you don't really have time to appreciate it. So it was back to the drawing board for me.
My eventual concept came from using just one of those many periscopes and imagining what it would feel like to pass through one of them, a ray of light entering a wormhole of sorts, bending as the path dictates. To this end I placed the paths of my freeways at different elevations, the city bound freeway running above ground and the outward bound curving underground. The two of them bend around the profile of the highway which is now not as high as it was before, but instead arches between the two roads. The enclosure minimises the amount of sound that hits the neighbourhood. The top quarters are mirrored in a concave manner so that they create visual distortions as they disappear around the corner. For some reason I imagined the trench holding the supports for the freeways could be used as some sort of street racing kind of location like the kind in those movies from the 60s. Even hoons would be happy here.
I'm not sure if I left anything out, but that's the general gist of what I was working on for all of three weeks. The tutors seemed pleased with it and didn't have too may complaints so all in all it was a pretty upbeat finish for a big presentation like this. It more than makes up for the lack of sleep that week.
Join me next time when I attend a Rogue Traders concert just to sit in the front row and boo them. Could that really happen? If I can get a couple other people to shell out some cash to go to the Shoppingtown Hotel (Babba have played there too... I'm sure they'd be honoured to be a fellow patron), then this conversation would turn a lot more serious...