Barangaroo Sydney
High expectations
Barangaroo International Towers, designed by British firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, was a finalist in the prestigious worldwide annual competition for the best tall building (Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat or CTBUH) run by a Chicago-based Council celebrating the best in innovative tall buildings, urban spaces, building technologies, and construction practices from around the world.
The building boasts the highest achievable 6-Star Green Star Interiors rating from the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA), receiving the most Green Star points for any Australian office on completion. 45dB completed base building and tenant fit-out systems throughout, for anchor tenants including LendLease and Westpac.
45dB designed, supplied, installed and commissioned an adaptive sound masking system for base building and tenant fit-outs, helping gain Green Star points and Well Building accreditation.
Westpac is the anchor tenant in Barangaroo’s T2 International Tower, taking up 28 floors for its 6000 staff across their Group. Westpac’s deep commitment to environmentally sustainable design and to producing flexible ways to work to support a health-conscious workforce, lead to 45dB’s opportunity to partner with them on what was their part of the largest sound masking installation in Australia.
By holistically designing sound masking systems for these towers, ambient sound levels now comply with the Australian Standard (AS2107) set by the Acoustics Association of Australia, and importantly, ensure workspace sound stays above minimum 30dBA levels. This helps prevent very high levels of speech intelligibility which erodes privacy, and also helps overcome partitioning performance issues relating to unwanted conversations being clearly overheard.
Whilst its great iconic Australian buildings are getting greener, its equally important the sound going on inside them gets better too.
— Tom Hardy
Barangaroo was the start of big things in acoustics.
Older ‘white noise’ systems had been something of a novelty to this point. Since this - the largest single site sound masking installation in the southern hemisphere or perhaps globally, management of ambient sound to condition office fit-out acoustics for productivity, privacy and comfort has been fully embraced by Australia leading to a succession of major project installations for 45dB Systems.