99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-01- 99% Noise

Episode Date: September 24, 2010

This episode of 99% Invisible is all about acoustic design, the city soundscape, and how to make listening in shared spaces pleasant (or at the very least, possible). It features an interview with Dennis Paoletti from Shen Milsom & Wilke.

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentury.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Here at the San Francisco Main Library, and that is Dennis Paletti.

If you walk into the library, there's a five-story atrium. He's an acoustic designer. And it also is very hard and reflective with all of the plaster concrete reflective materials. Companies hire him to make their buildings and boardrooms and cathedrals and public spaces sound better. One in early scheme the architect had the main information desk right in the middle of that floor plant in the center of that five-story atrium. The commotion that would go on, it would be disastrous for the people who had to work there to try to hear the

visitors coming in asking for things and to try to communicate. One of the things we recommend was to just tuck that information desk off of the atrium and tuck it under some of the mezzanines. Pretty simple, pretty minor, but to me just made such an improvement, I always liked that solution. But that smart and simple choice to tuck the information desk over to the left side, so patrons and librarians could actually hear each other, created this wide open circular entryway, and no one really knows how to walk across it without bumping into someone else. So this beautiful $140 million building has an added feature that certainly was not on the Architect's plans. It's a hack. A jankety, retractable movie theater style velvet rope partition that helps create the proper

traffic flow. And right there, 15 feet apart from one another, a minor triumph and a minor failure of design. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the gods get so infuriated with the noisiness of their human neighbors that they send a flood to wipe us all out. And when you walk around the city, it's pretty easy to slide with the gods in that scenario. What is noise? Noise is very simply as unwanted sound.

It used to be called environmental noise. But you know in recent years people are beginning to get interested in looking at a city's environment as something unique to that city. In San Francisco, the cable cars are always an interesting point of discussion. Is that sound or is that noise? Well, for tourism business in San Francisco, that sound, that's good, that's money. But believe it or not, we've been called in to people who are annoyed by the sound of those clanking bells or the cables that run under the street. The job of acoustic design is not just to make things quieter.

Sometimes the best way to design a space to have less noise is to add more sound. A reading room in a library. Quiet, quiet, quiet. It is so quiet that anybody flipping a page in a book turns out to distract everybody else. The problem acoustically, the background noise level, it's literally too quiet. We often come into spaces like that and add background noise. And that's why small parks and cities usually have fountains and if they don't, they mean one.

They may be visually pleasing, but the sound might even matter more. Fountains give you this comfort level of acoustical privacy. Masking unwanted noise. What's your noise? I don't know what it annoys me when I'm home and that's my place to relax. The neighbors always start mowing the lawn. So your action on them in the day is to listen. Not the people, people are annoyed. Listen to the city and let me me know what's your favorite sound, and what's your noise, and how is it enhanced or drowned out by the design of the city that you live in, or the building where you spend most of your time? Leave your comments at 99%invisible.org.

99% Invisible is produced by me, Rowan Mars, with support from Lunar Design. It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. produced by me, Rowan Mars, with support from Lunar Design. It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design.