When people complain about the state of public education in this country, they often focus on problems with teachers and testing. Abigail Stefaniw and Yasushi Shimizu, architects at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, would like to add bad acoustics to the list. Reverberation and background noise often make it difficult for students to understand what the teacher is saying. Yet despite the $20 billion spent each year on construction and renovation, school systems rarely devote resources to improved acoustics.
"Most architects just don't have any education in acoustics, and certainly not for small spaces like classrooms," Stefaniw says. So she and Shimizu created computer models of three types of rooms to give builders guidance. The first was a classic shoe-box shape, the second a rectangular room with two clipped corners, similar to the spaces used for small musical performances. The third followed an original design: a trapezoidal space in ...
