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ABOUT THE BUILDINGHaving won the RIBA Award West Midlands in 2014 and being one of 3 buildings on Birmingham City University’s City Centre Campus, The Parkside Building accommodates both Birmingham Institute of Art and Design and the faculty of Performance, Media and English, to allow collaboration in shared academic areas. The project value equated to £42.6m and was completed in June 2014.
The building design allows for daylight and natural ventilation by placing air conditioned studios at ground floor, with an open courtyard at higher levels. The entrance will have public access and provides a forum for end of year shows, with a prominent stair giving access to the upper levels with impressions of the various school activities. Staff and student areas are integrated allowing all-important interaction. (3) The Parkside Building acts as a hub for students and the open plan layout of the space lends it self to creating a constant buzz of students as they pass through it. The space also effectively achieves the feeling of belonging to the university and is used daily as a engaging academic and social space. However, the Parkside Building is constantly filled with a muffled white noise due to the everyday activity of the users, therefore it cannot perform effectively as specified auditory experience for students. We feel our idea enhances the sound quality of an area for a student working in the Parkside building, and works well to focus the students. This is achieved by allowing the user to identify what exactly they want to hear and using the device to concentrate on it clearly. |
Sound Maps - Testing and Analysis
As part of representing the problem that we are responding to in this project, we created sound maps of each floor plan of the Parkside Building. These maps are colour coded - the colours indicates the intensity of the sound, therefore the maps represent where the Sound Hoover would be used to concentrate sound in order to enhance the user's auditory experience.