Two years ago in the Netherlands, artist Paul de Kort designed an 81-acre park near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport with the mission of using nothing but landscaping to dampen the noise of airplanes. Such a project had never been attempted ~ and a crucial element of the design was discovered almost by accident.
Smithsonian’s Heather Hansman reported last month that the project was a success, cutting airport noise by almost half of what the community around the airport required. De Kort collaborated with an architecture firm called H+N+S Landscapearchitects, and scientists who had been studying the noise problem for years, to create a landscape that would dampen some of the noise of Schiphol. And they did it by using some very old-school landscape engineering.
All told, these simple ridges reduce noise 2 to 3 decibels, according to Works That Work. That was a success given the relatively small size of the park ~ which has been open for two years.
So, why aren’t our airports surrounded by Chladni-inspired land art yet? For one thing, not all are willing to spend money on an approach to noise mitigation that’s still experimental and doesn’t dramatically dampen the noise. And news of the project is still trickling out from the Netherlands to the rest of the world. De Kort says that most of the attention has been from the media, rather than other airports. But then again, he adds, “these are projects that you don’t decide overnight.”
But as cities grow towards airports, and as airports begin to anchor entire new cities, odds are good that developers may turn to Schiphol for guidance before long. If you look at the world’s fastest growing cities, many of them are being planned around mega-airports, which themselves look more like small cities—with hotels, malls, and entertainment centres—than infrastructure. In rapidly-developing parts of the world, access to air travel is being prioritized, and more people are going to end up living close to the roaringly-loud noise of airports than ever.
We’re living in the age of the aerotropolis—but to make airports truly livable, planners may end up looking to a Dutch land artist and an 18th century acoustic scientist for answers.
Re~Post: This Crazy Land Art Deflects Noise from Amsterdam’s Airport | The Smithsonian
