Improving acoustical outcomes in LEED-certified offices in the U.S.A.

摘要

Research at the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley in the U.S.A. on the satisfaction levels of office workers who inhabit new or renovated "green" office buildings has revealed an unintended consequence of current design practice in the U.S.A.: that is, satisfaction levels for speech privacy and noise actually decline, while at the same time satisfaction levels increase for all other indicators-such as thermal comfort, access to daylight, etc. This database is supported by several Federal agencies including the General Services Administration and the Department of Energy-two agencies involved in setting policies for "green buildings" in the U.S.A. One of these agencies, the General Services Administration (GSA), is the largest owner-developer-manager of office buildings in the U.S.A. and is responsible for providing office space for one million civilian government workers in 8,300 buildings throughout the U.S.A. GSA's director of research, Kevin Powell, decided to investigate and address this problem of declining satisfaction with acoustical comfort and speech privacy in "green" buildings. The authors (co-founder of ANSI S12 Working Group 44) worked with Powell and the agency's director of workplace strategies, Kevin Kelly, and with William Cavanaugh and others to draft a handbook for the General Services Administration and it's clients and contractors. The handbook is called "Sound Matters" and will be published in September 2011. The author of this paper describes how the acoustics anomalies were identified and defined and what the General Services Administration is doing to address and correct them.