A school is a row of limits: classroom, corridor, music, hall and prayer room.

Placement, not only thickness

A speech room beside a speech room has a lower limit than a music room beside a classroom, and lower than a gym over a row of rooms. School guidance, including the BB93 tradition and its counterparts in other codes, raises the figure when one volume is loud or the other is more sensitive. It is a planning range, replaced by the project code. Before adding layers: do not put music under classrooms, or the hall over a quiet room, or the fan room in the middle of the wing. Distance and order are cheaper than a box within a box in every room.

In a large school compound — classrooms, a prayer room, a hall and a pitch — the prayer room wants internal clarity (absorption) and insulation from the hall if the call or the address happens during a lesson. An open pitch is a neighbourhood line for nearby classrooms, not an Rw line. A kitchen and a canteen beside a classroom need a wall and a service door, not only an absorbing ceiling in the canteen.

• An open classroom without a door does not reach the insulation of a closed one. Write it in the brief.
• The corridor: ceiling absorption lowers the noise on the door, and does not delete the door seal.
• Two back-to-back electrical boxes are a hole. Offset them and close them with a dense sealant.

Doors and services

A door without seals drops a good wall into the twenties. A vision panel for safety is rated glass in the frame, not a hole. A shared duct between two classrooms sometimes carries speech more clearly than a weak wall. An independent branch, or a silencer at each outlet, is drawn with the mechanical engineer before the plan is approved. A hall over a classroom: L'nT,w, and a floating floor or a resilient ceiling, not a carpet alone.