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A tall grey room lined with undulating printed wall panels, with white loudspeaker columns and a person walking past

Acoustic Panel System

Immersive Design Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland · 2021 · Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich

29 bespoke 3D-printed diffuser panels whose undulating surfaces were generated and tuned for how they scatter sound.

The Immersive Design Lab at ETH Zurich, a laboratory for extended reality in design, architecture and engineering, needed a room with very even acoustics. Gramazio Kohler Research developed a computational design system that generates doubly curved, undulating panel surfaces, optimised to diffuse sound and to be printable. Six candidate designs were sand printed at 1:10 scale and measured with the robotic acoustic setup of the DDAD research project; the best one became 29 bespoke panels, printed and finished by Aectual, which went on to offer the panels as a mass-customisable product.

How COMPAS was used

The geometry generation was written in Python on COMPAS and COMPAS NURBS, so that it could be reproduced without proprietary software. It runs from Grasshopper through COMPAS RPC, alongside a quick FFT-based acoustic assessment and a fabricability analysis for the 3D contour printer.

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