Once in a while, one gets lucky.
The United Nations 🇺🇳 headquarters in Geneva is undergoing a major redevelopment of its campus, including many historically listed buildings and spaces.
Not only the Assembly Hall we regularly see on the news, but also the many rooms used for conferences, meetings, gatherings, and the support spaces behind them.
In diplomacy, bad acoustics is not an option. Poor intelligibility, excessive reverberation, intrusive noise, lack of speech privacy, or latency between the room and interpreters’ booths can all have serious consequences.
Acoustically, the work is about clarity, discretion, comfort, and reliability: reverberation control, noise control, speech privacy, and the performance of the audio systems.
It is a majestic place, where history is made every day.
A few photos from an earlier ARD site inspection with the UN engineering team.
Acoustic Research & Design Ltd 