Bisushima

Brief

A premium rooftop dining room above a working hotel, with a terrace, designed by Ben Adams Architects. The interior brief inverted the usual instruction. Rather than concealing the loudspeakers, the design wanted them visible, as objects that belonged in the room.

The operating brief was more demanding than the visual one. The room trades as a restaurant through dinner and shifts into something closer to a dance floor later in the evening, and it does that above bedrooms.

Constraint

Three problems, each of which rules out an obvious answer to the others.

Hotel guest rooms sit below the restaurant floor, which puts a hard ceiling on how much low frequency energy the structure can be asked to carry. The terrace leaks directly into open air, which makes external levels a licensing matter rather than a taste one. And no speaker structures of any kind were permitted outside, which removes every standard method of covering a terrace.

Over all of it, the room had to move from dinner to dance without anyone walking a system up by hand, because a manual volume increase is exactly when a venue oversteps what the building can take.

Design response

Low frequency was treated as a structural problem rather than an acoustic one. Acoustic flooring was specified through the dining area, and absorption panels were built into the furniture directly beneath the subwoofers, so the cabinets sit on a decoupled path rather than straight onto the slab above the guest rooms.

The terrace was solved by putting the system inside the landscaping. K-array ribbon elements were installed within the planters, which gives even coverage across the terrace at low level, produces no visible hardware, and keeps energy low and directed rather than thrown outward from a mounted box.

The day to evening shift was automated. Scene control steps the system up between dinner and late service on a defined path rather than an open fader, so the ceiling the building imposes is enforced by the system and cannot be exceeded by whoever is on shift.

Integration

Absorption inside furniture only works if it is specified while the furniture is still being drawn, which is why the Stage 2 appointment mattered. Speaker positions were coordinated against the interior scheme with Ben Adams Architects so that the visible hardware landed as intended rather than wherever the acoustics forced it, and the planter installation was resolved with the landscaping package rather than added to it.

Outcome

The restaurant changes character across an evening without changing the load it puts into the building, and the terrace is covered by a system nobody can see. Architecture Magazine featured the project for the integration of the loudspeakers into the interior scheme.