Airone Ex Cine-Theatre by Adalberto Libera. Acoustic Design and Analysis.

Visualising Sound Through Architecture. Tesi sperimentale in Acustica presso la Facoltá di Architettura Valle Giulia di Roma. Supervisors: Prof. Ing. Livio de Santoli and Arch. Marco Valerio Masci

Acoustic design through trial and error to achieve correct Reverberation Time (0,7s 1000 Hz) and related curve for the purpose intended (cine-auditorium). Analysis of the results in Ramsete for 423 receivers. Mesh Optimisation through computational geometry (Rhino + grasshopper) and analysis of the results for the optimised geometry with high orders of reflections (~13). Simulation results didn’t differ greatly between the 9th and the 10th order of reflections which allowed to run faster simulations. After optimisation the geometry was prepared to be imported smoothly in CATT-acoustics. The number of receivers, placed as a spatial arrays in grasshopper, was reduced to 100, to allow software comparison between Ramsete and Catt-Acoustics. As material absorption properties, receivers’ coordinates and geometries were shared across simulation environments, I compared the ISO 3382-1 parameters deriving from the simulations in the two software packages. I further analysed some of the receiver positions individually and auralised them in a walkthrough video. In addition, I created a video using the raytracing features of Autodesk Ecotect.

Ecotect Visualization - Airone from Alessia Milo on Vimeo.

Images available here

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to my supervisors, Livio de Santoli for educating architects to sustainability and energy management and Marco Valerio Masci for providing invaluable advice on acoustic design practices. Thanks also to Ivo Ambrosi for sharing the original survey material about the Airone (Nema Architecture + BluooStudio) and additional modelling consultancy.

This work has been published in “Musica & Architettura”. Edizioni Nuova Cultura 2012. You can read my essay in italian here.

Following my dissertation a number of activities have seen the Airone being taken as an example of abandoned heritage which should be looked after by public administration and brought back to life. Read about it in some news:

2019 planned interventions appiohblog movimenti corriere romatoday romatoday cinematreasures archidiap urbanexperience spaziopubblico