The Flagship at Sea Containers House
Project summary
The Flagship at VMLY&R Commerce, Sea Containers House is a fully immersive audio-visual studio and presentation space. The building includes noise sensitive spaces directly adjacent to The Flagship, which are operated by other tenants.
The Flagship requires high levels of operational amplified sound and so ensuring this was sufficiently controlled to minimise the risk of disturbance to the adjacent noise sensitive spaces was paramount. This involved the installation of a high-performance isolated box-in-box construction.
Sandy Brown was appointed to advise on noise transfer criteria, predict the levels of operational noise transfer, review and advise on the design details and proposals. Regular site inspections were also carried out monitor the installations during construction, and acoustic testing was carried out upon completion.
Detailed design
A timber framed box was installed to avoid any fixings to the underside of the floor slab to noise sensitive spaces above. This box was isolated from the slab below and lined with layers of dense plasterboard to the walls and ceiling of the studio space. Resilient hangers and clips were provided for the linings to the timber framing to ensure high levels of isolation were provided. A floated floor comprising multiple layers of cementitious boarding on discrete isolation mounts was installed to the studio space.
The interface detailing between the box-in-box elements along with the ventilation ductwork routing and attenuation was critical in ensuring a high performance was achieved in practice, along with low building services noise levels in the space. The post-installation testing achieved a sound insulation performance of R’w 89 dB with a low-frequency performance of R’125Hz 80 dB between The Flagship and the noise sensitive spaces above which is a high standard and met with the requirements we had set based on the client’s operational noise levels.
Listening tests were carried out within the adjacent noise sensitive spaces with The Flagship PA system operating at the maximum levels required by the client, to demonstrate that noise transfer was not audible.
