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Corridor - The busiest room in the building

Corridors and other communicational areas have to be multi-functional. People use them to move between the different rooms in a building. Corridors are where people meet and where supplies and materials are transported. It can be said that the corridor is a building’s most frequented room.

It is what makes the first impression of the building and the activities conducted there - from the entrance right on to the conference room, the classroom or the hospital treatment room. Corridors and other communicational areas are the lifeblood of a building, where function and appearance must have priority.

Space for conversations
Space for office machines
Easy access
Design possibilities

Office corridors are where numerous spontaneous meetings take place, so it must be easy to conduct a conversation there. At the same time, sound from corridors must not disturb the activities in adjacent areas. Multi-use of office corridors places extra demands on the sound environment.

These areas are perhaps used for meetings or for coffee breaks, and noisy printers, copying machines and servers are also placed in some corridors. It is thus no less important to have a good sound environment in corridors and other communication zones than the rest of the office.

Acoustics

• Hard floors and wall surfaces are often chosen for a corridor with wear and cleaning in mind. Wooden floors sometimes cause disturbing footstep noise.
• People who talk at a distance can also cause disturbance. The shape of a corridor facilitates sound propagation, allowing noise to travel and disturb a large number of people.
• A corridor’s parallel walls can also create flutter echoes.
• Noise, and the sound of talking, running and movement, must be restricted in corridors. You get the best sound absorption possible by making use of the whole ceiling area.
• Room Acoustic Comfort™ shows that you can benefit from many acoustic advantages if class A sound absorbers are used. There will be a reduction in sound level and less sound propagation, important particularly in corridors, which have a tendency to carry sound along their length and into adjoining rooms. Even reverberation decreases, improving speech intelligibility.
• The new parameters DL2, describing how sound fades with the distance from its source, and DLf, describing how the room contributes to the sound level in its different areas, are used to assess a room’s acoustic comfort. You can thus calculate your way to finding what acoustic measures are needed to create the desired sound environment. In narrow corridors, with the help of class A sound absorbers, the sound level (DL2) would decrease by 3–4 dB(A) per doubling of the distance. With the same treatment, the sound level (DLf) in the room will be about 7–8 dB(A) higher than it would be if this was measured out of doors, without reflecting surfaces. This indicates the existence of a good indoor sound climate, as the value involves significant sound reduction compared to a room with non-sound absorbing surfaces.