Puma Acoustics has just completed the ad hoc installation of acoustic panels in the new headquarters in Milan of Festool Italia, a business leader in the sector of business equipment.
The operation has involved an entire floor equipped with open-space offices and a regular-sized meeting room.
The design of such businesses certainly cannot neglect the aspects of acoustics and, together with the Architectural Studio Mauro Piantoni in Milan, which supervised the entire restructuring of the interior, Puma Acoustics approached the problems related to acoustics: reverberation, background noise and clear comprehension of speech.
An entire floor dedicated to open-space offices
The main acoustic demand in a large open-space office is without a doubt the elimination of background noise which is created by the overlapping of voices of people that are speaking among themselves, but also from the buzz of work devices such as computers, printers, and scanners.
Still, each setting has unique dimensional, functional, and esthetic characteristics. In the case of the headquarters of Festool in Milan,the setting in which the offices stand is located on an entire floor of about 150 square meters, in which the offices are distributed in a space in which the length-wise dimension dominates over the width dimensions, and which is characterized by a beautiful wooden covering with exposed wooden beams that would be a shame to cover with panels.
For these reasons, it was decided that a system of suspended, sound-absorbent panels such as those of Baffle would be mounted: such an operation represented the perfect compromise between the esthetic intention to keep the exposed ceiling and the acoustic demand of eliminating background noise.
A good meeting room must have all the necessary characteristics to ensure a great level of acoustic comfort. Speech must be understood by everyone without forcing the speaker to use excessively high voice levels.
If on the one hand it is necessary to eliminate reverberations, on the other, not all sound waves should be completed absorbed: even those seated in the last row must be able to hear the message clearly.
In the context of the meeting room of Festool in Milan, a system of horizontal suspended panels equidistant from each other and from the ceiling was thus conceived.
The efficacy is easily visible, and, at the end of the works, the improvements were immediately noticeable to the satisfied client.
