The 33 rd International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering Architectural Guidelines for Living Rooms, Classrooms, Offices, Sports Facilities and Restaurants Monika Rychtáriková a , Lau Nijs b , Konca Şaher b , Marinus van der Voorden b a Dep. of Building Structures, STU Bratislava, Radlinského 11, 81368, Bratislava, Slovak Republic b Delft University of Technology, Fac. of Architecture, Berlageweg 1, 2628 CR Delft, Netherlands a monika@svf.stuba.sk; b [k.saher;l.nijs;m.v.d.voorden]@bk.tudelft.nl Abstract [241] In general technical standards to establish the acoustical quality of a room are given in terms of the reverberation time. However, depending on room shape and dimensions (from 80 to 40,000 m 3 ), architectural function and acoustical use (single source versus multi-source), other acous- tical numbers may be more adequate. In practice there is a variety of rooms and functions on one side and a set of available acoustical quality numbers (RT, SPL, G strength, absorption coefficient, C50, U50, STI, S/N, NR-values, etc.) on the other. They may be considered as the rows and columns of a (huge) table. It is the ultimate goal of our research to fill some of the cells in this table. Since ray-tracing programs are not very accurate in predicting RT, the results are presented in a “G- RT-diagram”, which has proven to be a powerful tool for comparison between measurements and cal- culations. In most cases the correlation found for G is higher than for RT. This is as expected, since ray-tracing models are based on sound energy propagation. Preliminary architectural guidelines are given in mean absorption coefficients. They are more accurate than the reverberation time and are much easier to use by architects. 1 INTRODUCTION When designing a room, an architect needs to know how to translate “acoustical quality demands” into “building design parameters”. For the acoustical quality one should think in terms of “high speech intelligibility” or “low noise levels”; building design parameters are about architectural function, room dimensions, room shape and about the acoustical properties of the materials through the room (absorption coefficients, diffusion coefficients, location of materials). To connect acousti- cal quality and building design parameters, the reverberation time is widely used to assess acousti- cal quality. The present research at our Faculty of Architecture deals with two problems: • The reverberation time was invented to express musical quality. However, when acoustical qual- ity depends mainly on noise levels, the reverberation time may not be the best variable. • Eventually, an architect wants his/her information about acoustical quality expressed in room shape plus the material properties of the room. It is the aim of the present paper to deal with these problems for a few cases like sports facilities, classrooms, offices, etc. Spaces for music, theaters, etc, where the reverberation time was invented for, are excluded. 1/8