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May 19, 2009 | 6
Designing green buildings sounds like a great idea. But the reality is that energy-efficient buildings often sound downright crummy to the people inside them.
Surveys of occupants generally find that buildings meeting the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, the benchmarks for greenness, score higher on all measures except one: acoustics. “It’s not a happy story,” Kevin Powell, research director for the U.S. General Services Administration, told the audience on the opening day of the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Portland, Oregon.
The GSA houses more than one million government workers in about 8,500 buildings across the nation. In post-occupancy surveys, acoustics often received poor marks. And while federal LEED-rated buildings scored a bit better than non-LEED buildings, on a separate survey commercial LEED-rated buildings scored worse than non-LEED buildings when it comes to noise, he said.
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