The Daphne Oram Creative Arts Building at Canterbury Christ Church University is a £6.5 million development bringing together the establishment’s schools of Media, Art & Design and Music & Performing Arts. The building functions as a creative industries facility in honour of the celebrated British composer and former Christ Church academic at the university in the 1980s.

The modern learning facilities, located at the edge of the Canterbury City World Heritage Site, includes a central Reading Room, rehearsal and performance rooms, recording and sound studios, computer labs, plus exhibition space located on the ground floor.

The site was designed to achieve BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating, with implementations including building orientation, appropriate insulation and maximised natural daylight. The site successfully accomplished seamless incorporation of historic and modern elements such as the display of the original St Augustine’s Abbey beneath a glass floor.

Sandy Brown was appointed to create an acoustic design strategy intended to meet BREEAM requirements as a minimum standard. These requirements include façade sound insulation and ventilation strategy, internal sound insulation, acoustic quality of spaces and building services noise and vibration control. Consideration was given to the control of resonances in all music performance, recording and playback spaces.

• High performance isolated box-in-box music practice suite
• Isolated live rooms and drum studio
• Bespoke wide-band reverberation control treatment including panel resonators and absorptive elements.
• Performance venue with high performance facade to control external noise emission to nearby noise sensitive receptors.