Chandler Archbell: Best Final Assignment Ever!

The purpose of an acoustic tile in a lecture hall or theater is to diffuse sound while preventing echoes.  To accomplish this, I designed a chevron-like tile with different spacing between the raised and lowered parts to create a visually interesting form that looks continuous when put together with other tiles.  The tile also performs well at diffusing sound and preventing echoing.

Process sketch: initial iteration

single tile

assembly of tiles

sound diffusion in action

I then took my acoustic tile and placed it in my theaters.  Here is a section demonstrating the placement of the tiles.  The tiles near the back begin to turn downward in order to reflect the sound from the back of the theater back toward the audience.  The rows of tiles are hung using steel rods that are bolted to the exposed I-beams above.  The material of the panels would be a dark wood with a matte finish because of its reflective qualities with sound.  The matte finish would be added to prevent light reflection in (what is supposed to be) the dark theater.

Assignment 4: Chandler Archbell & Brian Bollens

For our furniture piece, we designed a bunk system that was suspended from the northeast side of our bath house.  Due to this exposure, our bunkers woke up to a wonderful view of saco lake and Crawford Notch.  However, in the case that they did not want the sun to wake them up, or they just hated seeing nature from their own bed, we designed a shutter to close off the window.  In our connection detail, we focused on how the door meets the rest of the bed enclosure.  First of all, we designed to door to be flush with the wall when it was opened and closed, making the whole enclosure appear seamless to its inhabitant.  We also cut out a curve in the ceiling of the bunk that accentuated the door's movement.

We only mocked up the top corner of the bunk systems.  We used reclaimed particle board desktops because plywood is so overrated.  This is the door in its closed position.

Good morning Brian!

The door seamlessly meets the wall, while its movement is articulated by a simple curve.

After we made our first mock up, we realized that the door did not remain flush with the inner walls once it was moved to its closed position.  Because our seamless idea was only true half the time, we needed to further develop our joint.

I see the seam!

This was our new design.  It involved cutting a slight arch out of the side walls.  Our door got a 45º cut so that there was only one, seamless point of contact.

We did our research.  The ideal hinge was a Rockwell SOSS invisible hinge.  It becomes embedded into the wood, and it is perfectly flush with the wall when closed.