17.10.2016
Articles
Building a planet of sound for the Royal College of Music in Stockholm
With a spectacular main building in gold shimmering glass, it’s impossible to miss that the Royal College of Music in Stockholm (KMH) has got a new campus. In the summer of 2016, the school moved to newly-built premises that could meet KMH’s extremely high acoustic demands.
“Everyone who worked on the project was trained in acoustics to understand the audio requirements,” says client’s representative John Wessel, Project Manager, Akademiska Hus. Caverion’s responsibilities covered Heating & Sanitation, Ventilation & Air Conditioning, Electricity and Lighting in music studios, chorus halls and classrooms. The projects acousticians have inspected all the installations in all rooms.
“It has been a fun and complex project where we had very good cooperation with all the parties and we have succeeded in keeping both the schedule and the budget. Caverion has taken the specific requirement seriously and managed to solve problems that were hard to describe in the original plans for a building with such high acoustic demands,” Wessel says.
Over 200 sound rooms
The college has more than 200 sound rooms, which are built as a “room-within-a-room” to help meet the noise requirements. No other building in Sweden has this many sound rooms. The floors in all the sound rooms rest on special rubber bushings on which walls and ceilings in turn rest.
“It was a very interesting project. The acoustic requirements were mainly related to practice rooms, recording studios and concert halls. There will certainly not be any noise between rooms,” says Sara Tauberman, Project manager from Caverion.
The project covered a total area of 21,900 square metres and the building’s climate has a relative humidity of 40–60 per cent.
