This Crazy Land Art Deflects Noise From Amsterdam's Airport

[Disir]

The Netherlands has a long history of shaping the physical environment to suit citizens’ needs—Amsterdam, for instance, is built around a system of manmade canals. So, a large-scale landscaping project at Schiphol was not out of line. Officials decided to reimagine the land surrounding the airport to drown out as much of the ground noise as possible. They brought on H+N+S Landscape Architects and artist Paul De Kort, who designed the maze-like park.

De Kort drew on 17th-century Chladni patterns. In his experiments on acoustics, German scientist Ernst Chladni strew sand or salt across a metal plate and then brushed a fiddlestick along it to create vibrations that caused the grains to set up in ridges. The artist also studied historic farming techniques in the local Harlemmermeer area to come up with his design. “I tried to create a symbiosis between a purely functional landscape of horizontal ridges and a pleasant environment,” he says.

De Kort used GPS to plow 150 perfectly straight and symmetrical furrows with six foot high ridges between them. In the valleys, he built mini parks and bike paths. He also incorporated art pieces that drew on the history of the project, like “Listening Ear,” a parabolic dish that is large enough to stand in. The sculpture amplifies the ambient sound, a nod to the park’s purpose of deflecting that noise.

Finished in October 2013, Buitenschot cut the decibel level of the ambient noise in half almost immediately. They set up 35 noise monitoring points around the region, and when tested in 2014, the volume at each location did not exceed the desired level. The airport is trying to cut it down even further by changing when certain planes can take off and requiring airlines to update their fleets.

A NASA study of the Schiphol project found that a multi-faceted noise control plan was important, because they worried that just addressing noise on only one level, like cutting down the number of flights, might have negative economic impacts. "Noise management plans have the potential to severely disrupt interstate, or international, commerce and exert strong negative pressure on the aviation industry," the study said.
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Ya, it's only been completed since 2013. Who knew?

The pattern that the ridges assume on the ground is also part of de Kort’s design. Inspired by Haarlemmermeer’s watery past and the angle at which the Geniedijk cuts through this strict grid of reclaimed land, he envisioned the ridges as waves turning towards a beach before fading out. To create this effect, a second layer of ridges is rotated at 18° with respect to those ridges running parallel to the structure of the polder. The result is an exciting, meandering landscape – and because this second layer is perpendicular to the direction of the noise, it helps further combat it. De Kort also pushed for some alterations that simply enhanced the aesthetic: he was determined, for example, that the ridges run to a pointed end in order to make the landscape more fluent, despite being more expensive to create and adding little to the ridges’ noise-reducing qualities.

De Kort’s influence has been to make the story of the landscape legible – to humanise it for the residents of Hoofddorp and Vijfhuizen. The shift in the angle of the ridges, and their height, lends Buitenschot a maze-like quality, which makes people slightly disorientated. ‘The surrounding landscape of the Haarlemmermeer is so overwhelmingly large and wide, and there is always a strong wind, it seemed right to me to create spaces of a certain intimacy and seclusion within these surroundings,’ he says. Sheltered glades and smaller and larger ‘rooms’ within the landscape structure invite people to play sports, games, or simply relax. A paved bike path connects the Geniedijk to the outlying country road, while a system of mown paths provides an informal network in and around the ridges, whose soil walls are sown with slow-growing red fescue.

‘Chaldnipond’ is one of two artworks de Kort designed for the site. Halfway across this diamond-shaped pond is a bridge with a mechanism underneath it with which you can create waves in the water. ‘The reflections of these waves against the straight riverbanks brings the design of the entire land art park into mind,’ he explains.
Landscape Journal

I can't locate any pictures of the Chaldnipond.