Dive Brief:

• Mixed-use buildings have an inherent challenge for designers and contractors because they often mix noisy uses with quiet ones.
• Sound travels in the air, and vibrations travel through the structure itself.
• Getting an acoustical engineer into the design process early helps avoid problems.

Dive Insight:

Ground-floor uses most often are retail, which means people noise and perhaps equipment noise, while upper floors quite often are offices or residences where sound is undesirable. Understanding acoustical properties early and accounting for them in the design may push up costs, but the alternative is finding out about noise problems too late to fix them and losing value as a result.