Commonwealth Bank - Darling Square
Hitting the sweet spot.
Home to Australia’s largest business and anchoring the revived Darling Harbour preceinct are the Commonwealth Bank’s iconic Woods Baggot designed and Lendlease developed Darling Square buildings. The 44,000 square metre 12 story development, more startup hub than bank, boasts wellness facilities and flexible workspaces, supporting both intellectual and physical performance.
In order to meet the hugely varied needs of 3,000 occupants, 45dB partnered with ARUP to help optimise sounde design, through acoustic performance than enhanced both speech privacy and acoustic comfort.
As ambient sound reduces, speech intelligibility increases in turn. This allows unwanted conversation between co-workers to become too easily understood, making it almost impossible to concentrate.
Sound conditioning played an essential role of the acoustic design, as there was no ambient sound delivered by silent passive chilled beam air conditioning. Without the sound system 45dB designed, supplied, installed and calibrated, the workspace would have remained too quiet.
Working in conjunction with acoustic consultants ARUP, 45dB designed installed and calibrated a fully adaptive sound conditioning system that ensures optimal speech privacythroughout the working day.
“As ambient sound reduces, speech intelligibility increases in turn. This allows unwanted conversation between co-workers to become too easily understood, making it almost impossible to concentrate.”
— Tom Hardy
Multi-zonal adaption
By increasing the ambient sound using a multi zonal adaptive system, 45dB not only reached compliance with Australian Standards, we enabled continual adaptation to changes in conversational activity throughout the working day.
For a workspace environment build to facilitate activity-based working, this flexibility served to protect those in quiet focus from sporadic noise arising from spontaneous collaborations that happen anywhere at anytime.