CASE STUDY: SAMMAMISH HIGH SCHOOL

Designed to be the “crown jewel” in the Bellevue School District in Washington State, the newly modernized Sammamish High School’s campus replaces an outdated single-story facility with a three-story, state-of the-art educational facility. The 320,000-square-foot structure serves nearly 1,000 high school students across grades 9–12. The school includes light, bright spaces with open atriums and common spaces bordering classrooms, which means that thoughtful acoustic management needed to be a core part of the design. Designers at Integrus Architecture opted to feature stone wool acoustic ceiling systems throughout the facility as a sustainable solution that would support the comfort, health, and wellness of the school students, staff, and visitors.

Photo courtesy Rockfon

In educational facilities where even students in the back row need to understand the lesson, modular acoustic ceilings decrease reverberation and increase speech intelligibility.

With challenging design goals that included creating spaces for small, medium, and large group learning and interaction, and ensuring that those spaces could be flexible for different teaching and learning styles, Integrus opted for close collaboration on the project. By working with the school district, principal, teachers, and students, the architects successfully designed a space that incorporated sustainability, provided an excellent learning environment, promoted community outreach, and ensured safety. Stone wool’s high-performing sound-absorptive properties were used for the facility ceilings. The material’s modern aesthetic made it an ideal choice for the new space, with the bright white surface enhancing the available light and saving energy costs. In addition, stone wool’s resistance to indoor health hazards such as mold, bacteria, and humidity—along with low VOCs and high fire resistance—helps keep the interior spaces healthy for staff and students alike.

Finally, while also managing the acoustic, health, and comfort needs of classrooms, gymnasiums, administrative offices, and common areas, stone wool panels enhance the overall safety of the spaces by being mounted on suspension systems that met the project’s seismic design category requirements. For a large school meant to be the crown jewel in the district, the combination of beauty, functionality, safety, and easy installation was key.

CASE STUDY: CITIZEN HOTEL

Citizen Hotel in Sacramento, California

The Citizen Hotel in Sacramento, California, is recognized as one of the oldest and most beautiful skyscrapers in the city, and as a luxury boutique hotel, guest comfort is a top priority. Quiet hotel rooms were a must when boutique hotel company Joie de Vivre revived the historic Cal Western Life building in 2008 to create the 198-room hotel. While the initial construction plans did not include strong soundproofing, the project manager for the development opted for a product that would provide quiet rooms, all while allowing the project to be finished on time and under budget.

Rooms were lined with thin sound-reducing board that achieved the desired STC ratings, all while conserving as much space as possible in each room. Moreover, the utilizing the material, which requires less layers than other gypsum boards, meant that the green building objectives were met. In addition to being a green solution, the material resists mold, which enhances the quality of the indoor air environment down the road.

CASE STUDY: MCDONALD’S GLOBAL HEADQUARTERS

Photo courtesy USG

Noise at the McDonald’s Global Headquarters in Chicago is controlled through monolithic acoustical drywall ceiling systems.

When McDonald’s moved its global headquarters from a Chicago suburb to a new downtown location, the designers were presented with a number of challenges. The new nine-story, 500,000-square-foot building kept employees physically separated with the multiple floors, a setup that could potentially undermine the company’s values of collaboration, productivity, and worker well-being. As a way to maintain those values both in the building design and company practice, the building interior was deliberately designed to ensure that all of those values were consider priorities.

The site itself houses several McDonald’s features, including the managerial training center, Hamburger University, open work and conference areas, indoor-outdoor terraces looking over the city, McCafe beverage bars, and a McDonald’s restaurant, which features international menu items. In short, the site is dynamic and relies on a mixed-use approach.

With the variety of spaces and different uses, both aesthetics and acoustics were key challenges that needed to be addressed. As a way to ensure a sleek, modern design, the architect opted for an acoustical drywall ceiling system that controlled sound—especially in high-traffic areas—and had a modern, monolithic look. The design solution addressed the aesthetic needs and noise issues, maximizing NRC and CAC performance.

According to Ruben Gonzalez, senior associate for Interior Architects, “The USG Ensemble system worked really well for McDonald’s. The execution went smoothly, and the client likes how the system looks and is performing.”

CASE STUDY: AD EX DALLAS

Photo courtesy Focal Point

An acoustic luminaire and baffle system solved the lighting and acoustic needs for the Architecture and Design Exchange (AD EX) building in Dallas.

When the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Architecture and Design Foundation (formerly DCFA) moved to a new location in an older building in Dallas, one of their primary requirements was to redesign the roughly 26,000-square-foot space to include public areas and administrative spaces. The public area on the first floor needed to be multifunctional to accommodate a variety of uses, including training and events. This large room needed to be able to shift between one large space and multiple smaller spaces. As a way to make the large space visually cohesive, the design included a unified ceiling plane as a consistent element: this shift required that the original ceiling tiles be removed to expose the open ceiling structure. Not surprisingly, there were some challenges with the acoustics.

Omniplan, the architectural firm, addressed the echoes prompted by the approximately 1-second RT by installing acoustic luminaire and baffle systems in relevant spaces, such as the first-floor training room. In its finished form, the room featured 40 continuous runs of 12-inch-tall acoustic direct illumination luminaires and unlit acoustic baffles with 1-foot on-center spacing to provide a flexible system that worked in tandem with the space’s lighting requirements. This contributed to reducing the reverberation time in the space by approximately 30 percent to make it comfortable for its multiple uses.

CASE STUDY: DAIRY FARMERS OF AMERICA (DFA) OFFICE

Photo courtesy NanaWall

The new Dairy Farmers of America Headquarters building features opening glass walls that offer isolation from exterior sounds when closed while maintaining visibility to the outdoors.

One challenge of large, open interior spaces—especially in office environments—is that privacy can be difficult to secure. Boardrooms and conference rooms, which are typically used for meetings where privacy is key, tend not to be used on a daily basis, and thus can be considered an expensive feature for such low use.

Designers at HOK, Des Moines, helped the Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), the fourth-largest dairy product company in the world, with this challenge when designing its new headquarters. The three-story building pays tribute to farmers and milk, with a central atrium that features a 25-foot sculpture of pouring milk. Other features pay homage to farm life, with barn wood wall cladding, a grass wall, and a “red barn” wall—all aspects that express the DFA’s identity. “This is a farmer-owned cooperative and represents and honors the farmer,” explains Eric Linebarger of HOK, lead designer of the project.

In this new design, the DFA wanted to update the space from its old, traditional office building location to better reflect changes in its in-office business practices. Specifically, it wanted minimal offices and multiple meeting rooms. To meet this need, HOK designed the second and third floors to be lined with all-glass meeting rooms that help light the building’s interior. On the main floor, glass walls open to inviting outdoor spaces. The combination of high-performance acoustics from the glass barriers, natural light, and creative aesthetic create a whimsical, welcoming interior space that is light, bright, healthy, and quiet.

CASE STUDY: ISABEL BADER CENTER

Photo courtesy AMBICO

The Isabel Bader Theatre surrounds performers and audience in a high-performance acoustic environment designed for optimal sound.

The Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, known as “The Isabel,” is a 90,000-square-foot performance venue on the Queen’s University campus in Kingston, Ontario. The building, which incorporates and revitalized two redeveloped buildings, preserves the site’s history and architectural significance, all while providing state-of-the art acoustic design in each of the five unique spaces. Key materials include old-growth heritage wood from the original structures, glass to capture the lake views, and textured steel to mimic the reflections of sunlight on the water. Throughout the space, nearly 100 wood and steel acoustic doors and frames help block sound from room to room, with STC values between 40 (steel and wood) and 51 (steel), in addition to some unequal pairs of STC 59 steel doors. One of the critical requirements for the theater was to limit sound migration from the outside. To this end, the manufacturer was consulted and supplied door and frame units that met the acoustic demands to limit the outside noise while maintaining the stunning aesthetics of The Isabel.

The 566-seat performance hall, for example, features 2-foot-thick concrete walls that completely block all exterior sounds and a state-of-the-art ventilation system designed to bring in air with virtually no vibration through the system. In addition, the hall has curved walls designed to reduce echoes and provide fine-tuned, lively acoustic effects. The space also includes retractable, motorized drapes that allow sound to be customized for each performance. In the design phase significant coordination was required between the acoustic door manufacturer and hardware consultant to ensure that acoustic performance levels were maintained without compromise to the door function, security, or access control requirements of the facility. It truly was a balancing act of design to successfully meet these strict standards, but tackling these issues early in the design phase ensured this occurred successfully.

In addition to the performance hall, the building includes a studio theater, a film-screening room, a rehearsal hall, and an art and media lab. Each of these spaces is acoustically unique, with the “black box” studio using modular acoustic panels, the film-screening room providing each audience member with identical acoustic experiences, and a rehearsal space that exactly mimics the acoustics of the performance hall. The art and media lab provides a flexible space that encourages creativity and experimentation.