Case Study

Clement Acoustics were appointed to work alongside the design team, to advise on the environmental impacts for the varying proposed uses, to ensure the units were protected from noise levels in the existing town-centre location, as well as from each other. The design brief also included detailed design of the internal elements within the residential, hotel and cinema uses. 

The particular challenges with regards to environmental uses were ensuring that sensitive uses, such as residential apartments with typically high sensitivity, as well as cinema screens and hotel bedrooms with specific end-user requirements could be designed with external facades that could reduce external noise from surrounding roads and existing commercial uses to an acceptable level. A number of the uses, particularly the cinema and restaurants, also had significant noise generation associated with them, as well as plant installations for all uses. These needed to be carefully decided to control the breakout of noise to close-by sensitive neighbouring uses. 

For internal acoustics, the residential and hotel uses had strict requirements for sound insulation between adjacent rooms, which had to be accommodated to ensure the buildings were fit for purpose.  

The particular challenge was the Vue Cinema, which included incredibly high levels of noise generation, immediately adjacent to highly sensitive spaces (e.g. ‘extreme’ auditoria next to typical auditoria). All designs also had to consider the large spans required, with wall heights often exceeding 7 m. 

The walls and floors were all designed alongside the design team, and commissioning tests demonstrated that all elements had met the requirements in each block.