News & Stories

Hush Rooms by Parsons Healthy Materials Lab featuring Quiet-Tech

1. Choosing the Materials

Jonsara Ruth, decided to use this opportunity to experiment with products Healthy Materials Lab had been researching. "It was exciting to test a material in a space that will have consistent use by a large group of people. It's a great opportunity to get people's reachtions while installing and having researchers experiment with different designs.

1 of the 3 materials selected was Quiet-Tech Insulation by CarpetCycle. Founder, Sean Ragiel, "has a really interesting idea of circular economies, and how he can take a waste and make new products from it." 

CarpetCycle takes used carpets, cleans them, shreds them and now uses them for Quiet-Tech insulation batts, which are designed for sound attenuation. Quiet-Tech is free of formaldehyde and fiberglass, is Greenguard Gold Certified, and puts a major emphasis on sustainability, making it a good fit for Healthy Materials Lab. 

2. Design and Installation

CarpetCycle donated Quiet-Tech to Parsons for this project. "The materials drove the design," says Sarah Burns, "there were not a lot of drawings because we were experimenting with the materials"

The Quiet-Tech was more difficult to manipulate than the other materials Parsons was using. Therefor they decided to manipulate as little as possible and let Quiet-Tech drive the design. 

3. Results

The Quiet-Tech room had a vivid blue color with all kind of colors interspersed. "The texture of all those little fibers," says Sarah "you can imagine all those different carpets, how many different homes are part of this wall. While Quiet-Tech was more difficult to manipulate, it wound up being the most effective in terms of sound insulation. With only 2 walls covered, the room has absolutely no reverberance. 

www.healthymaterialslab.org

by: Felicity Lu-Hill & Allison Sloan

Photo credits: Martin Seck