With more than 1,600 daily flights going in and out of Schiphol Airport, the area is not only busy but also very loud, making life difficult for the people living in the surrounding neighborhoods. For this reason, officials decided to redesign the land surrounding the airport and create something that would drown out as much of the noiseas possible while still having an aesthetic appeal.
They invited artist Paul de Kort and H+N+S Landscape Architects to design a proposal which ended up becoming a maze-like park inspired by 17th-century Chladni patterns, which have proved to have useful acoustic characteristics that include dampening sound. The pattern is named after German physicist and musician Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, who was known as the “father of acoustics”. He discovered that certain patterns are created when a plate or membrane covered with sand vibrates at specific resonance and the vibrations cause the sand to move and concentrate along the lines where the vibrating surface meets the still area.
Related: National Parks Service maps show noise levels across the US—with and without humans
De Kort used GPS to plow 150 straight and symmetrical furrows with six foot high ridges between them, creating a pattern that has reduced the levels of ambient noise in half. Thirty five noise monitoring points were established around the area and first successfully tested in 2014.
+ Paul de Kort
+ H+N+S Landscape Architects
ViaSmithsonian
Photos by Paul de Kort
