Bricks set melodious tone

摘要

The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire's new home has been built on a compact urban site adjacent to a dual carriageway on Birmingham City University's campus.This is both an open public performance venue and more private educational institution. It has five performance spaces,stacked one above another over three levels on the site's small triangular footprint by architect Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS). To minimise sound transfer between performance spaces, each is structurally separate with a heavy massed floor and wall construction supported on a steel frame to form series of isolated boxes within the Conservatoire's brick envelope.Colin Cobb, an associate at FCBS,describes the building's envelope as a 'carved solid', which he says provides a 'protective castle' around the noise sensitive interior.Tough, elegant brick facades protect the venue acoustically. 'We wanted the building to express a sense of history and timelessness; cladding it in beefy masonry seemed one way of delivering that,' Cobb explains. That beefy masonry also helps keep out road noise. 'Making this a brick building,ensured the acoustic solution was in sync with the aesthetic solution,' he adds.