Design Solution · Interior & Wellbeing
Design Solution · Dream about it
Stack contrasting quiet and active uses in one open building.
Quiet study, archive, noisy dance and performance are arranged in a single building with overlapping double-height spaces rather than separated into discrete blocks. The mix creates a lively shared institution and chance encounters between disciplines. Acoustic and spatial planning let the uses coexist.
The design proposition here is that mixing quiet archival study with noisy dance and performance in a single open-plan building, rather than separating them into acoustically discrete volumes, produces a more vivid institutional life through the casual encounters and visible cross-discipline activity that physical proximity enables. The spatial argument is coherent — double-height shared volumes with visual connection between activities can generate the kind of chance encounter that segregated buildings suppress — but it is also the proposition that acoustic engineering must be most sceptical of. The record claims the uses coexist through spatial and acoustic planning, but carries no post-occupancy acoustic measurement, no reverberation data and no user-satisfaction evidence; the approach sits at claimed level with no provided verification. For a specifier the honest risk is that the brief's tolerance for noise bleed between uses may be higher at inception than it proves to be in occupation, and remedial acoustic treatment inserted into an open-plan arrangement later is expensive and architecturally disruptive. The model is most viable when the client has been deeply involved in defining acceptable noise conditions for each zone and those conditions are written into the acoustic consultant's brief as hard performance targets.
#mixed use #university #shared space