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We had the pleasure of working with ABA Studio on the expansion and renovation of the Little Red Elisabeth Irwin High School, which is featured on the cover of Contract Magazine! A truly interesting project that added new collaborative education and active learning spaces and created a sense of community with new public spaces…Congratulations to ABA and the LREI team for job well done!
sketch by Karl Jensen / ABA Studio
Featured in the September 2015 issue of Interior Design is our project for Insight Venture Partners with Smith Maran Architecture. This 32,000 square foot corporate interior in the Grace Building combines “the seriousness of finance” with a “downtown groove”, while paying homage to the building’s famous convex white travertine facade. Acoustic privacy and sound quality were paramount given the sensitivity of venture capital negotiation, and the project included fitness and game room areas requiring unique acoustic treatments.
Those tremors you feel in your high-rise building may not be an earthquake. Ten minutes of violent shaking in a 39-story Seoul skyscraper were attributed in 2011 to “17 middle-aged people” doing Tae Bo to “The Power” by early 1990s German hitmakers Snap!
Every building has its own natural resonances that can be excited by rhythmic activity. In most buildings these resonances are relatively docile and hard to excite, but when wide structural spans and thin slabs lead to a low natural frequency, it doesn’t take many kickboxers to get things…kind of hectic.
Your eardrum converts the motion of the air into something you can hear, but what if everything around you could work the same way? In a recent TED Talk, MIT researcher Abe Davis demonstrates cutting edge research into extracting audio from silent video of everyday objects exposed to sound. Using high-speed video equipment and even a consumer-level camera, he extracts intelligible music and speech just by watching a nearby houseplant or a snack bag—the proverbial “fly on the wall”. Acknowledging the surveillance possibilities (which were already feasible using lasers), the research pushes beyond audio to expose the natural modal movement of an object by simply ensonifying it and recording what happens, allowing one to push, pull, and shake something virtually without ever touching it.
The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate was dedicated this week at a ceremony attended by the President, Vice President, the Kennedy family, and former colleagues of the Senator, with coverage on Meet the Press and the New York Times. The Institute is adjacent to the JFK Library on the University of Massachusetts Boston campus and includes classrooms, exhibit space, and a full size replica of the United States Senate chamber. Working with Rafael Viñoly Architects, we helped the building architectural and mechanical designs achieve acoustic environments conducive to speech intelligibility, learning, productivity, and reflection. The Institute opens to the public on March 31, 2015—see you there!
