RocketSpace

RocketSpace’s new 110,860 sq ft London campus sees a 1980’s Islington building stripped back to its original concrete frame, revealing a blast-proof, reinforced structure and brickwork. The upper floors have been divided into an open plan dedicated workspaces and cellular office suite spaces. The impressive double height basement (a former underground bank vault) provides a shared social, interactive networking hub and event space with bleacher seating, teaching facilities, media pods, a bar area, and meeting rooms. The bank vault itself has been repurposed as an informal lounge and games room for the members and retains the original vault doors.

With alumni including Uber and Spotify, RocketSpace has become synonymous with fostering high-growth tech start-up businesses. The London campus boasts 1,000 fixed desks designed by the project architect LOM. The open plan workspaces and private office suites use over 700 linear meters of acoustic glazed partitions. 1,200 tonnes of material was removed to create the subterranean, double-height events space which features a digital screen comprising 24 panels for presentations, conferences and seminars.

The event space is the gravitational centre of the campus. We provided comprehensive design advice, including a review of the auditorium layout, a performance lighting solution and acoustic design input in order to achieve suitable levels of speech clarity and sound separation from neighbouring areas.

We also provided acoustic design advice for the remainder of the campus, including the open office areas, the bar, the meeting rooms, and the games room.

The ideal quality of a room’s acoustic depends largely on the room’s function: auditoriums should be quiet with a high emphasis on speech clarity, bars and foyer spaces should be lively without leading to an excessive buildup of noise, office spaces should be quiet enough to promote productivity without being oppressive.

For the acoustic design, we set design criteria to achieve the desired room acoustic of each space. With these criteria in mind, we used computer modelling techniques to establish the required quantity, location and performance of acoustic finishes. Once this was established, we then worked with the architects to select suitable acoustic finishes (so the rooms were looking great, not just sounding great!), and then helped with the coordination of these finishes with other building elements such as building services and the building’s structure.