COUSTICS | TRUMPINGTON COMMUNITY COLLEGE Silent treatment The design brief for Trumpington Community College was for open teaching spaces overlooking a large, airy atrium. The challenge for Max Fordhams acoustic engineers was ensuring teachers were not disturbed by noise from neighbouring spaces. Andy Pearson reports T he City of Cambridge Education Foundation is committed to human-scale education. It wanted its newsecondary school for 750 students in Trumpington, Cambridge, to be designed toenable students to work alone, or in small or large collaborative groups, in spaces that allow for multiple, simultaneous student activities. The foundation even took the design team, assembled to build the new facility, to Denmark to visit two schools that had beendesigned around a similar ethos, with open-plan learning to encourage pupil and staff interaction. Avanti Architects design for Trumpington Community College incorporates elements from the Danish schools, including a day-lit atrium; the schools entrance leads pupils directly into this triple-height space, the centrepiece of which is what the architect terms an oversized stair. This doubles as informal raked seating, while leading pupils up to two L-shaped teaching floors that wrap around the central void. The upper floors have classrooms at the outer perimeter while open-plan, informal teaching areas surround the atrium, to enable up to 250 students to be taught informally, at small tables, in clusters of two and three. The school wanted open-plan spaces to facilitate multiple, simultaneous activities but open-plan teaching has a bad reputation for noise issues. Max Fordham, the acoustic consultant for the project, was so concerned that background noise levels would significantly affect speech intelligibility that it used its SoundSpace laboratory to replicate for the design team and teaching staff the precise acoustic conditions that pupils would experience. It then usedthe laboratory to develop an appropriate solution. Our brief was to create comfortable study conditions in which students and teachers could communicate over short distances of up to approximately two metres, explains Pedro Novo, acoustic engineer at Max Fordham. He says there are two main acoustic issues with openplan space: control of direct sound coming from adjacent spaces and control of the reverberant sound, which arrives from all directions. Because the open-plan spaces are high, long and wide, these conditions occur in pretty much every space where teaching will take place, he adds. The performance standard for speech intelligibility in open-plan spaces is 6 April 2019 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE Apr19 pp06-08,10 School Supp Trumpington Acousticsl.indd 6 22/03/2019 13:12