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Acoustics in Green Building
18 October 2010

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.

Not only are acoustics often ignored by architecture professionals when it comes to green buildings, but they’ve also been ignored by the organizations responsible for defining green buildings. According to Niklas Moeller, vice president of KR Moeller Associates, “Some green building rating systems, such as LEED, have traditionally excluded credits for anything acoustical. At best, they’ve offered it up as an optional credit.” That problem may be changing, though: Acoustical professionals view the USGBC’s efforts to include acoustical credits in LEED for Schools and LEED for Healthcare as a good step in the right direction.

 

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