New temporary interactive pavillion in Poly Canyon unites students across different majors
At this year’s annual Design Village competition in Poly Canyon, visitors will be able to experience a new and interactive structure. The Biophilic Instrument Pavilion (BIP) will provide people with a unique visual and audio experience.
According to Anita Shanbhogue, architecture senior who worked on the project, the structure provides visitors with an immersive experience.
“We’re developing color prisms, and when the light shines through the prisms they create these colorful shadows and reflections,” Shanbhogue said. “We’re developing a series of sensors that respond to the colors and to people’s interactions within the pavilion.”
The BIP is a structure that came from the Center for Centering Pavilion, a project that started as a prebuilt structure that used wood construction with friction-fit joints and laser-cut sale material that cast shadows beneath the structure.
Architecture senior Sloan Woodward said that this year’s project is an attachment to it.
“The Center for Centering already has its own concept and goal, it was a place where you can go and people held meditation practices,” Woodward said. “It was designed to evoke the feeling of being underneath a tree canopy.”
The BIP pavilion will respond to people through two mechanisms through color and motion.
Electrical engineering senior Drew Thomas worked on a color detector in the structure that detects the different colors that the prisms make with the sun, and computer engineering junior Joseph Galicinao worked on a motion detector that responds to movement within the structure to produce music.
“The idea is to synthesize sound based off natural elements,” Galicinao said. “It detects people’s motion inside the actual structure, and based on how far or how close you are to the sensor, it synthesizes sound.”
Ultrasonic sensors will emit waves that bounce off objects and bounce back to the sensors, based on how long it takes to register. Once the sensor registers a distance, a sound will be produced based on the range.
“I based it off a C sharp pentatonic scale,” Galicinao said. “For any pentatonic scale, five-note scale, [the user] can’t play any wrong notes, so the whole idea was to not make ugly noises.”
Throughout the project, the students worked closely with two advisors, Julie Herndon, a composer, performer and sound artist who works in the music department at Cal Poly, and Cal Poly architecture professor Thomas Fowler.
“I gotta give [Herndon and Fowler] credit because they’re the ones who helped put all this together, got the grant money and, and kind of organized us as a group and picked us in the first place,” construction management senior Eddie Pascua said.
Woodward and Shanbhogue also received help from David Kempken who works as the Instructional Shops Manager for the College of Architecture and Engineering (CAED) Support Shop.
“It was really exciting working with the chromatic final and casting the custom joints. It was a very involved process that we learned a lot from,” Woodward said.
“It was really exciting working with the chromatic final and casting the custom joints. It was a very involved process that we learned a lot from,”
Woodward said.
The structure will be available for visitors to interact with during Design Village on April 26 and 27.
“I’m excited to see people kind of play around with it. Something that I kind of look for in these kinds of installations is the ability to interact with it,” Pascua said.
The project brought together students from different majors, something that is relatively uncommon when it comes to projects like this. Woodward wants to see more programs at Cal Poly overlap with each other.
“I’m hoping [the project] inspires people,” Woodward said. “Even if it’s primarily architecture students at Design Village, I hope it inspires them to branch out a little bit more and work with people who have different backgrounds or anyone else who’s there.”
The interactive elements of the structure will only be available during Design Village and will be taken down after the competition.
