Danielle Lehmann: Looking Out Week 12

The Bechtel Conference Center is in San Francisco, California and was designed by Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects. The team wanted to design a conference room which didn't allow people to "take sides" by literally making the room circular. This created a problem though because completely circular rooms apparently have very poor acoustic properties or natural "undesirable acoustic distortion".

In order to correct this the firm worked with several people in order to manufacture rippling, wooden panels. The panels were made by a CNC machine and were "lined with acoustic substrate" The rippling of the wood and the substrate helps to randomly disperse and redirect sound from the center of the room while also being aesthetically pleasing.

Looking into the Conference Center

Walls of Conference Center with two podiums

Plan of entire building - conference center in middle