“A building to house the world.” That’s what the architects of a remarkable new research lab in East London were tasked with designing.
The building in question is a gigantic testing ground for simulating life-sized urban environments like railway stations, town squares, and main streets. The goal is to understand how people of all abilities perceive and interact with these environments by simulating them under controlled conditions where everything, from light to sound to the way the floor can be configured to tilt in any direction, can be controlled. The ultimate goal? To use those findings and rethink our environments using an evidence-based understanding of how people move through space.
The so-called Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL) was designed by London architecture firm Penoyre & Prasad, in collaboration with University College London’s Centre for Transport Studies director Nick Tyler. The building was completed in April 2021, but after almost a year of fine-tuning the technical interior, experiments have begun.[Image: courtesy Penoyre & Prasad]As a result, most of the interior is clad in all-black materials so the building can disappear into the background, and the background sound level and reverberation are very low. For example, the HVAC system was designed so that a series of vents descend into the space and deliver heat directly to certain zones, which helps reduce the air velocity (and noise) that would’ve been required had the vents been higher up.
The absence of sound is a core element of the research center’s first experiment. At the beginning of February, PEARL started a project with Transport for London and e-scooter operators Lime, Tier, and Dott, to develop and test a universal warning sound, after several scooter collisions in the U.K. (Electric carshave been dealing with similar challenges.)Once the sound is developed, the researchers will “slot” it into the soundscape for participants to test it out against the sound of traffic. To make it feel even more realistic, Tyler says they’re going to build a set that mimics a pedestrian square.
In many ways, the building is an ode to the senses. When we go out into the world, we use touch, smell, hearing, and even taste to interact with our surroundings, but most of the time, the only sense that architects design for is sight. “The only way you know the world is through your senses,” says Tyler. “To understand how we perceive the world, which is what we’re after, we have to be able to control the environment in each of those senses.”
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