How to cope with noise in open plan offices

The shape of the rooms, the behaviour of the ceiling to the angle of sound, the number of people accommodated in a given space—all these factors are discussed by the author in relation to measurements taken in offices in Europe and Scandinavia. The generic term 'open-plan' is used to describe the offices, since not everyone agrees on what consititutes a truly landscaped office. The author is a consultant with the Acoustic Advice Bureau, IR.VMA Peutz BV, of the Netherlands.     

荷兰建筑师的态度与方法

本文结合作者在荷兰建筑机构和事务所工作多年的经验,阐述荷兰建筑界较为普遍的工作方法和职业态度，来剖析一些成功的荷兰建筑师及建筑事务所不断成长和发展的核心驱动力。     

屏障隔声降噪量计算中需探究的问题

隔声屏障是降低车间、办公室噪声、特别是降低道路交通噪声非常有效的措施.屏障的隔声效果用屏障的隔声降噪量衡量.对常用的两种求解屏障隔声降噪量的方法分析后,认为存在值得探究的问题.     

"创人民满意"消防窗口在规范化建设中的几点思考

“创人民满意”消防窗口建设作为消防救援队伍的一项重点工程、亮点工程、民心工程,如何加强人民满意消防窗口建设和提升窗口服务质量,既关乎民生又紧贴民心。笔者结合工作实际,通过分析当前“创人民满意”窗口建设中存在的问题,有针对性的对消防业务受理窗口建设展开研究,重点阐述消防窗口规范化建设工作亟需解决的难点、热点问题,提出紧紧围绕窗口人员业务能力培育、信息化改革建设、监督考评机制运用等多维度全方位措施,以强化消防业务受理窗口的建设质量和服务水平,不断提升“创人民满意”消防窗口规范化建设水平。     

境外规划设计事务所近年在中国大陆发展的记录与思考

国外城市规划设计事务所在大陆发展已经从点到面,从个体到联合,从项目落点到大规模发展铺点.本文从笔者参加过的大量组织和评审国际招标竞赛的实例着手,指出了国外城市规划设计事务所在大陆参与规划设计中的概念和理念及其目的的混乱,划分了国外城市建筑规划设计事务所在大陆发展的阶段,进而从全球化的视角分析国际城市建筑规划设计事务所自身的发展趋势,并整理分析了国外规划设计事务所当前在大陆拓展业务的方式及其发展面临的困难,讨论了其总体发展的趋势和特点.本文记录和思考这一发展趋势,以期引起同行同仁的共同关注,把这一发展趋势引入健康的轨道.     

After flexible manufacturing in the factory...flexible working foroffice staff

Offices are expensive, underused assets that do not deliver the correct working environment for much of the work that is done in them. Changing the work setting improves productivity and saves large sums of money. Here, the author describes how the change is very much more to do with staff and management, than offices and technology. It is also not as disruptive as it is thought to be     

Indoor climate, psychosocial work environment and symptoms in open-plan offices

To study the indoor climate, the psychosocial work environment and occupants' symptoms in offices a cross-sectional questionnaire survey was made in 11 naturally and 11 mechanically ventilated office buildings. Nine of the buildings had mainly cellular offices; five of the buildings had mainly open-plan offices, whereas eight buildings had a mixture of cellular, multi-person and open-plan offices. A total of 2301 occupants, corresponding to a response rate of 72%, completed a retrospective questionnaire. The questionnaire comprised questions concerning environmental perceptions, mucous membrane irritation, skin irritation, central nervous system (CNS) symptoms and psychosocial factors. Occupants in open-plan offices are more likely to perceive thermal discomfort, poor air quality and noise and they more frequently complain about CNS and mucous membrane symptoms than occupants in multi-person and cellular offices. The association between psychosocial factors and office size was weak. Open-plan offices may not be suited for all job types. PRACTICAL IMPLICATION: Open-plan offices may be a risk factor for adverse environmental perceptions and symptoms.     

试析"样式雷"的身份与职业地位

清代样子匠的职业大致相当于皇家建筑师,以雷氏一族最为著名,即所谓“样式雷”世家。已有成果对雷氏家族的身份与职业地位仅有只言片语的表述,同时还存在一些误解。试就数年来整理样式雷图档的收获与体会,对样式雷世家的旗籍、品秩、世袭、多重身份,在皇家建筑设计中的作用,与帝后、皇族、官员、算房及营造厂商的关系等方面作简要分析。     

Using Display Energy Certificates to quantify public sector office energy consumption

The influence of internal and external characteristics on energy use in the public sector office stock in England and Wales is explored using a database of 2600 Display Energy Certificates (DECs) combined with other sources of disaggregated office information. The DEC office benchmarks are shown to match the median fossil thermal and electrical consumptions well. Analyses of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), size, occupancy density, building age, location and rateable value are considered. While newer offices are shown to have lower typical fossil-thermal consumption than older offices, this is counterbalanced by higher electrical consumption, resulting in higher typical CO₂ emissions. This has implications for the UK's emissions reduction targets for 2050, indicating that while building regulations that focus on thermal performance have been successful, a focus on electrical consumption (both regulated and unregulated) is key. The results are also compared with existing benchmarks for all UK offices, splitting the sample into four generic types, and compared with a similar smaller study of private offices. This indicates that public offices typically used less energy than the general benchmarks had previously predicted, particularly for prestige offices.     

Changes in French Architectural Education

“Beaux-Arts” has long been a pejorative in modernist circles, architectural and educational, but the actual workings of the school from which the term is borrowed are not as well understood as they were in the days when so many American architects attended it. Here they are described as the starting point of a discussion of the changes that architectural education in France is now—so laboriously and painfully, by all accounts—at last undergoing. The article may be read as a sequel to “Architectural Education and French Traditions” by Peter Collins (Aug. ‘66). Its author is a graduate of Illinois Institute of Technology who has spent most of the past three years working in various French architectural offices.     

Thermal comfort and use of thermostats in Finnish homes and offices

Thermal comfort and use of thermostats in homes and office rooms were examined by a quantitative interview survey with a nationally representative sample in Finland. The total number of respondents was 3094. The results show that thermal comfort levels are lower in offices than in homes. People feel cold and hot more often in offices than in homes during both the winter and summer seasons. The perceived control over room temperature is remarkably low in offices. Higher thermal comfort levels and perceived control in homes are supported by greater adaptive opportunities. In offices people have fewer opportunities to control the thermal environment, people deal worse with thermostats, and people have lower opportunities to adapt to different thermal environments.     

Vergleichende Untersuchung raumakustischer Konzepte von Mehrpersonenbüros hinsichtlich Sprachverständlichkeit,Arbeitsgedächtnisleistung und Arbeitsbehaglichkeit durch Hörversuche

Comparative studies of room‐acoustic concepts for open‐plan offices with regard to speech intelligibility, short‐term memory perfomance and acoustic comfort. Increasing use of tempering the core of reeinforced concrete ceilings of open‐plan offices for cooling and if necessary for heating strongly limits the implementation of sound‐absorbing ceilings. In these cases the classic concept for offices with fully sound‐absorbing ceilings and screen barriers is not applicable anymore. As an alternative to this concept of screen barriers a so‐called partition wall concept is going to be implemented in these open‐plan offices. In this case a sound‐absorbing ceiling is not used anymore; instead room‐high partition walls are mounted, which are highly sound‐absorbing on both sides. The objective of the study was to compare these two concepts for open‐plan offices regarding speech intelligibility on the phone, ability to concentrate and acoustic comfort. In addition to that the effect of low‐frequency absorbers was investigated. To evaluate the acoustic concepts of theses offices audibility tests were conducted. For this purpose the room‐acoustic conditions of the office situations were auralized with the help of measured binaural room impulse responses of original open‐plan offices. For comparison an open‐plan office without room‐acoustic measures was included. With this procedure different office situations are directly comparable.     

Modeling occupancy in single person offices

This paper examines the statistical properties of occupancy in single person offices of a large office building in San Francisco. A probabilistic model to predict and simulate occupancy in single person offices is proposed. It is found that vacancy intervals are exponentially distributed and that the coefficient of the exponential distribution for a single office could be treated as a constant over the day. Occupancy intervals are more complex than vacancy intervals. The distribution of occupancy intervals is time varying. Variations among different offices are examined. The implications of the findings on thermal and air quality control are discussed.     

Private employment through public labor marketing offices: A proposal for a more constructive public welfare program

The paper proposes a new program that may reduce dependency on direct cash grants by channeling welfare-sector labor to the private sector of the economy. This program requires establishing a new institution- the local public labor marketing office-whose main function will be to aggressively market the types of labor that the disadvantaged, many of whom are chronically unemployed, can offer. The paper provides a broad view of this and other supporting functions of the local labor marketing offices, the activities in which they should direct their efforts and the advantages of the program over alternative arrangements.Opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not represent the views of The Urban Institute or its sponsors. The paper was written before the author's involvement in related work for the Federal Government.     

Using field measurements of desktop illuminance in European offices to investigate its dependence on outdoor conditions and its effect on occupant satisfaction,and the use of lights and blinds

Adequate indoor illuminance is accepted as one important determinant of conditions for comfort and productivity in offices. This paper uses the results of field surveys in 26 offices in five European countries (France, Greece, Portugal, Sweden and the UK) to investigate what illuminance levels are actually achieved on office desks, what light level is considered ‘best’ by occupants, and how this is affected by outdoor sky conditions and illuminance. The paper also explores how blinds and lights are used by occupants to modify light levels at their desks. The office workers show a remarkable degree of adaptation to different light intensities. They use controls to modify the light level at their desks to almost the same mean level irrespective of the sky conditions outside. There is a small but significant effect of lighting on self-reported productivity which seems to be higher when offices are daylit.     

Time-dependent occupant behaviour models of window control in summer

This study aims to extend the understanding of the window-opening control by occupants in private and two-person offices in summer. A field study was carried out from 13 June to 15 September 2006 in offices with and without night ventilation, located in Cambridge, UK. The monitoring data give evidence that there is a statistically significant relationship between window-opening behaviour patterns and indoor stimulus (i.e., indoor air temperature) in summer. The activity of window control in offices both with and without night ventilation was mostly constrained to the start of period of occupation. Once a window state had been set up on the arrival it mainly stayed the same until departure. The percentages of total window change events in offices without night ventilation during the intermittent period from open to closed and closed to open were 3% and 2%, respectively. A window in an office that featured a night cooling strategy was always open upon the departure whenever the room temperature was over 23.6 °C. Finally, the stochastic models to predict window-opening behaviour patterns as a function of indoor temperature, time of day and the previous window state were developed.     

The costs and benefits of using daylight guidance to light office buildings

Daylight guidance systems are linear devices that channel daylight into the core of a building. This paper analyses costs and benefits of using the two main classes of daylight guidance to light offices as an alternative to conventional electric lighting. The work demonstrates that daylight guidance is generally not economical using conventionally accepted measures of both cost and benefit. It is shown that if intangible benefits associated with the delivery of daylight to offices are included in an analysis, a more favourable balance of cost and benefit is obtained. The implications of this for practical use of the systems are discussed.     

The role of office industries in development planning

Industrial Development has tended to be oriented to the attraction of manufacturing facilities. This paper discusses the trend towards service industries in the North American Economy, and the potential impact of developing office industries on a local economy. The literature on office location theory is reviewed and the results of the literature review are related to decentralization of offices to a planned new town near Metropolitan Toronto. The results of a survey of Toronto offices is presented and the results compared to that of the literature. Policy recommendations are proposed for the new town to attract office developments.     

Do your offices pass the 4-L test?

Landscaped offices and the more straightforward open-plan offices can bring light and a sense of added spaciousness to the office worker. But noise is another matter, and occasionally ventilation may not be as efficient as one might hope. This article reports on Swedish field studies of the reactions of workpeople to their new surroundings.     

Numerical investigation of local thermal discomfort in offices with displacement ventilation

Local thermal discomfort in offices with displacement ventilation is investigated using computational fluid dynamics. The standard κ-ϵ turbulence model is used for the prediction of indoor air flow patterns, temperature and moisture distributions, taking account of heat transfer by conduction, convection and radiation. The thermal comfort level and draught risk are predicted by incorporating Fanger's comfort equations in the airflow model. It has been found that for sedentary occupants with summer clothing common complaints of discomfort in offices ventilated with displacement systems result more often from an unsatisfactory thermal sensation level than from draught alone. It is shown that thermal discomfort in the displacement-ventilated offices can be avoided by optimizing the supply air velocity and temperature. It is also shown that optimal supply air conditions of a displacement system depend on the distance between the occupant and air diffuser.