Music College - Sound Scape Recordings

The Green Park project was a free response project, where the design was developed from the reaction to the site. My impression of the site was as follows.

Firstly, the overall site had no defintion, the buildings floated on a green manicured sea whilst the building occupants came, resided in the buildings and left. The spaces between the buildings were there to be looked at and not used.

Secondly this lack of defintion was emphasised by the intrusive noise from varying sources around the site, the industrical complex, the M4 motorway, the main road into Reading to name a few. This meant that the area had a negative Soundscape.

My theory was that to redefine the area the creation of a positive Soundscape was required, to focus the sound and therefore bring defintion to the area.

My proposal for this was to bring people to the area that would utilise the external spaces at all times of the day, thus creating a new soundscape. Part of this process was to also create an external auditorium that would present a central focal point to this new soundscape.

The overriding proposal for the area was to create a Music College that would satisfy the above theoretical criteria.

The design started by analysis of the existing sounds in the area. This is shown in the chart above, taken at varying times throughout the day.