Leanne Zilka designed an acoustic meeting pod in collaboration with textile designer Jenny Underwood.
The PleatPod is a meeting pavilion that provides spatial separation for meetings in open plan offices. It employs the fashion technique of pleating, where a linear length of fabric is folded to adapt to the cylindrical form of the body, in order to create an acoustic enclosure that uses sound rated materials to form pattern, structure and skin. By using the pleat technique, a fold is transformed from the simple folding of a material back onto itself into a form. The gathered moments of the Pleat provide stability for the rest of the enclosure, as well as increasing the surface area of the meeting space for sound attenuation.
The PleatPod has been commissioned by RMIT University and was fabricated using a variety of digital manufacturing tools. This work comes out of research done on the way fashion and textile create form with floppy fabrics, as a way to create architecture where structure, skin and enclosure are one.