Proposal For Reversable Intervention to Historical Monument, By Means of Room Acoustic Simulations

The historical building “House of Silence” (17th century building) in Egenhoven, nearby Leuven (Belgium) has been already for more than 70 years recognized as a protected monument. In 2011 has this mansion become the property of KU Leuven with a promise on preservation of the spirit of the domain. Several acoustic problems, related to sound insulation and sound reverberation, have been identified by the new users. It is well known, that the acoustic comfort inside the building strongly depend on its function, the change in function is always bringing new challenges in terms of acoustics. The house is situated in a very quiet area with very low background noise levels inside the building, which on one hand makes it in general a pleasant place for meditations, reading or concentration work, but at the same time it makes the sounds produced inside the building interior very audible. The second problem is a rather long reverberation time in the meeting rooms that makes it difficult for easy use of nowadays conferences or meetings. In this article we present a study case that has focused on an accurate prediction of acoustic comfort inside the meeting rooms, such as simulation of reverberation time and speech transmission index for different variants of reversible interventions to this monument.

ISBN:978-80-228-3224-3

Publication year:2020

Accessibility:Open