2024 - Light Lo-fi High and Fly

“Lofi Music Center Project” aims to response the problem of a lack of easily accessible space for holding music events, to overcome the problem of lacking space to support users, and to ready for all weather conditions in Thailand. By using “Lofi” music, the architecture of this project is regarded solving the emotional problems of people in society, who often want to strengthen their concentration and a stable emotional state in various activities. This project is, therefore, a center for all types of musical activities including a space for performing music, a school for teaching music, and a product store for other activities along with listening to music to enhance concentration, and a library for collecting information about lo-fi music.
Lo-fi music is a music genre that has the characteristics of music consisting of natural sounds, therefore suitable for listening to enhance concentration and stability of the emotional state. Various areas within the project have been designed, including the shape of the building, building layout, and landscape. Based on the concept of “Lofi high and fly”, taking into account the use of low fidelity sound waves, colors, and materials that give a feeling of cloudiness, lightness, and comfort from the characteristics of Lofi music. Also, to achieve this concept, the shape of the building is floating to make the user feel calm, which is a soothing feeling while listening to Lo-fi music.
The lighting innovation designed within the project is “the double skin façade”, which is designed to be a vertical wooden lattice that gradients at the top end of the lattice to look like a curved lattice panel. The shape and the height of each curve is designed from simplifying the shape of “hook” sound frequency within the lo-fi music. The situation creates a curve that gives a feeling of flowing, unhurried, comfortable, and it matches the various elements of the project. The double skin façade is installed on the glass wall on the east side. and the south side of the second floor of the building (the music school section). This is intended to block sunlight entering into the classroom and to have an appropriate amount of daylight (the classroom requirement of 300-500 Lux).
Wood is considered one of the materials with the greatest ability to absorb sound. It also gives a feeling of being close to nature and does not cause environmental impacts in the production process. Therefore, the material of double skin façade panel is plywood with a mixture of cork. In order to increase efficiency in preventing noise from inside the building caused by musical activities from disturbing neighboring buildings surrounding the project, two layers of curved wooden lattice panels is used and overlapped for this purpose. By placing overlapped 30-millimetres of the curved wooden lattice panels, this distance can make the double skin façade as a tool to reduce the reflection of sound that will return to the classroom.
The double skin façade uses wooden slats with a cross-section of 200 x 100 millimeters, spaced every 150 millimeters, and wooden slats with a cross-section of 200 x 100 millimeters, spaced every 110 millimeters. This reason is due to the fact that the wooden slats are overlapped, leaving a 30-millimeter space for daylight to pass through and they are connected the panels with 200 x 100 mm boxwood. the sunshade panels are installed using angle iron and screws and connected to concrete floor and concrete walls. The tall lattice panels are installed close to the glass wall and are layered with shorter lattice panels. This condition makes a stronger and more durable installation efficiency due to more space for the frame. In addition, the arrangement of slatted panels is placed so that they are as similar as possible to sound waves that are overlapped in two layers.
In this project, we consider the amount of light to be sufficient to create calmness, concentration, and paying attention in learning as well as creating the feeling of learning about lo-fi music. Therefore, a double skin façade was installed to have a ratio of at least 60% to the glass wall area of each classroom. The reasons of this are to increase efficiency in reducing the amount of sunlight and amount of heat and to get the same level of illumination inside the building in each room, while people inside the room still being able to see view of nature and various elements within the project like they are all “surrounded by nature”.
From the DIALux simulation results, the amount of daylight inside the building is in the range of 300-500 Lux, suitable for enhancing concentration. and paying attention on learning for both children and adult. This condition also helps reduce the accumulation of heat within the building envelope surface and interior space.