Green buildings do many things well – but noise control and speech privacy can’t always be counted as items on that list. Post-occupancy evaluations collected and studied by the Center for the Built Environment at University of California Berkeley offer proof. “If you looked at their surveys three or four years ago, you’d find that, relative to acoustics, satisfaction was slightly lower in green buildings than it was in regular buildings,” says Ken Roy, senior research scientist and acoustician at Armstrong World Industries.

Unfortunately, some of the approaches that make green buildings green also result in poor acoustics. “Many of the strategies employed to produce energy savings, reduce waste, and increase indoor environmental quality (IEQ) can contribute to a workplace that has less ambient (background) noise and fewer barriers between the sources of distracting noises, speech, etc., and don’t include the proper amount of absorption,” explains Brian Riley, president of Margenau Associates Inc.