Project Information

This large BREEAM ‘excellent’ school with over 10,500 m2 of teaching facilities saw a number of new buildings built in phases around the existing school, which also had extensive refurbishment. Acoustic design was important in the auditorium used both by the school and local theatre companies.

Project Details

Location:	Swansea, UK
Client:	City and Council of Swansea
Architect:	Stride Treglown
Contractor:	Leadbitter (now part of Boyges)
Contract Value:	£22M
Completion Date:	2014 – 2015 (in phases)

Located in close proximity to the M4 motorway, Morriston Comprehensive School is significantly affected by road traffic noise and was at first designed to rely on mechanical ventilation by the original design acoustician.

MACH Acoustics was brought in by Leadbitter to challenge this strategy. After detailed noise survey and noise mapping assessment, MACH reduced the extent of the mechanical ventilation strategy such that natural ventilation could be applied to the majority of the building with simple open windows, a cost effective and sustainable solution that changed perceptions.

Our Services

• Detail noise survey and assessment of ventilation strategy.
• Internal sound insulation, indoor ambient noise level, cross ventilation and reverberation time design.
• High performance design in the auditorium and music spaces.

MACH supplied our flexible and highly affordable NAT Vent attenuator as a cross ventilation solution to noise transfer from corridors to classrooms. Our internal design managed to value engineer the over specified partitions from the previous acoustician, and removed layers of double plasterboard across the entire roof initially thought necessary for rain noise mitigation.

Our work enabled all BREEAM credits relating to acoustics to be achieved, including a tricky +5 dB design target for the music practice and recording rooms, a target which has since been seen as too onerous and removed in recent versions of BREEAM.