FIS’s Citigroup Tower office merges acoustics with visual delight

Looking to renovate its London-based Citigroup Tower office, which comprises more than two floors of dedicated work, meeting and collaboration spaces, leading technology solutions firm FIS partnered with City Axis, a space design company with over 25 years of experience.

The aim was to explore how each of FIS’s office settings could best serve employees, taking aesthetics, functionality, and most importantly, acoustic experience into consideration. With noise transfer being one of the main issues in the spaces, FIS’s top goal was, “to find products to help improve acoustics without compromising the design for their quiet rooms, small internal meeting rooms for 3 to 4 people, and a larger 8-person meeting room,” stated Mart Brett, Project Manager for City Axis.

At this point, Karen Littler, City Axis’s talented designer, reached out to BuzziSpace for our expertise on the matter and to find all-in-one solutions to help fulfill FIS’s requirements and expectations. To determine the best product match for each space, Richard Ellerbeck our Global Acoustic Consultant, conducted an acoustic assessment. This test entailed measuring the reverberation time of each room with the BuzziSpace RT60 mobile tool. The test allows us to identify the acoustic properties of each room, as well as accurately determine the most appropriate acoustic solutions to introduce in order to reduce reverberation times to acceptable levels.

Moreover, when Littler was asked to describe the biggest design challenges on this project, working out which colors and patterns to use was highlighted as the main concern. BuzziSpace cooperated with this holistic design approach by bringing in a range of vibrant and cheerful options while creating a well-balanced room acoustically.

Quiet rooms

As a result, our acoustic panels BuzziTiles and BuzziGrip (which adheres to glass) were chosen as the most suitable solutions for the small silent rooms. Not only does this wall treatment contribute to reducing unwanted noise, but the memo board also allows visual privacy among the different rooms.

Meeting rooms

The larger meeting areas were equipped with BuzziKey Soft in different hues and depths, while the reception area was housed with a BuzziProp, one of our signature acoustic lighting elements, additionally providing a tasteful zest of color

The above graphs indicate that the original reverberation time (as represented by the top line) is higher than what would be considered acceptable for a teleconferencing or meeting room of this size. To manage noise levels and to improve the call quality, it would be necessary to ensure that reverberation times after treatment (as indicated by the second line) fall within the recommended range signified by the two horizontal black lines.