From sport to science: the acoustics of a pool transformed into an auditorium

The re-use of an abandoned building is probably among the most sustainable choice we can do in the built environment. A dismissed public building has been donated to the University of Foggia, Italy, due to the demand of facilities that the different departments requested for their academic meetings and events. The original building was provided with a swimming pool on the ground floor, to be 50 m long and 3 m deep. The architects in charge to apply the change of use have designed the realization of an auditorium within the original pool. The project consists of the installation of the audience seats on a 10% sloped stalls area, having a rectangular plan layout. The short dimension headwall, that is 3 m high, has been designed to allocate a screen for image and video projection. Before any change, a campaign of acoustic measurements has been undertaken in order to assess the existing conditions of the room, having a volume size of 4000 m3. The results from the first survey highlight that the main acoustic parameters were significantly outside the optimal range for an auditorium. This paper presents a parametric investigation of some mitigation solutions applied to lower the reverberation time and to increase the speech intelligibility (and the STI). The addition of absorbing surface areas allowed the users to effectively make use of this facility. A second campaign of measurements carried out after the realization of the acoustic design have been compared with the predictions, to finally tune the retrofitted room