This NYC music venue uses springs to soundproof itself
National Sawdust is an event space that took five years (and a bunch of engineering magic) to realize. Based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the building is a nonprofit looking into the creative process behind making music. Which we're sure is fascinating, but it's the design that caught our attention. Early into the project designers conceived of a box-in-box arrangement, keeping the outers shell, but building something new inside it. While it solved several design issues, it also meant no sound traveled inside the performance space and no sound escaped. That said, being cited in the middle of NYC — that wasn't quite enough. With a subway running underneath the venue and heavy traffic outside, the designers decided to lift the new building's design above roughly 1,000 springs, dampening noise and converting that energy into heat.
The performance space itself is inspired by an 18th-century chamber house, from a time when musicians' creations responded to the aural characteristics of the space. At the same time, the room can also be adjusted and tweaked for different performers. And those flat surfaces are ideal for projection mapping -- something that wasn't a mainstay of 18th-century chamber house music.
(Edited to remove mention of water springs. It's actual springs that help with noise dampening.)
