As one of the selected Scholarship recipients for the AIA Academy of Architecture for Justice Fall Conference, I am honored to be joining the AAJ members in Portland this September!
While my educational background has been primarily in design, I received my Masters in Architecture with a Focus in Acoustics from Virginia Tech in 2011. During my studies at Virginia Tech I received a Student Initiated Research Grant and attended the Fourth Concert Hall Research Group Summer Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was also awarded the Robert Bradford Newman Medal for Merit in Architectural Acoustics for my thesis “Chamber Hall Threshold Design and Acoustic Surface Shaping with Parametric Modeling”. I have spent the past two years employed with Edward Dugger + Associates, an architectural acoustics consulting firm in Stuart, Florida. It is this experience in acoustics that has brought me to participate in the AAJ Conference this year.
As an acoustic consultant I do a great deal of work in the realm of justice architecture. From the initial acoustic design of new construction to creative problem solving in facilities that are not performing up to industry standards, room acoustics and noise control are critical elements in the success of any justice facility. Just this past week, I spent an evening conducting acoustic tests on the courtrooms of the Palm Beach County Judicial Center analyzing whether or not the jury rooms were adequately isolated from the adjacent courtroom; speech privacy being one of the most significant aspects of acoustic design in courthouses. Common acoustic issues in justice facility design range from speech intelligibility, achieving appropriate reverberation time, mechanical noise control, sound isolation between spaces and more recently, the accommodation of AV and IT systems.
By attending the AAJ 2013 Conference I hope to gain a greater understanding of the unique challenges that architects face in the design of justice facilities so that I can tailor my own acoustic design approaches to be better prepared from a project’s inception. While many fundamental acoustic principles translate across disciplines, each sector comes with its own distinguishing characteristics that can be utilized to enhance design.
I’m very excited to attend my first Academy of Architecture for Justice Conference and look forward to some interesting discussion and getting to know the Justice Community!