Industries
Commercial and workplace acoustics
Noise levels matter to around 70 percent of employees and satisfy about 35 percent of them. That gap has barely moved in a decade of workplace redesign, and it persists even in offices that perform well at everything else: among workplaces certified as high-performing by Leesman, satisfaction with noise still sits at 45 percent.
It is not a hard problem to improve. It is a problem that gets left to resolve itself, and it does not. Handled deliberately, the acoustic environment is one of the highest-return decisions in a fit-out and one of the cheapest to get right early.
Our experience
The engineers at Bentham have worked as acoustical consultants on commercial and workplace projects across Canada, from thirteen-floor headquarters fit-outs down to single-floor renovations, alongside new office buildings, base building upgrades and mixed-use developments.
A significant share of that work has been for professional services occupiers, including repeat work for several of the large downtown Toronto law firms, along with banks, investment firms and consultancies. That is a sector where speech privacy is a professional obligation and where the same standard has to be met floor after floor, which makes the detailing and the verification matter more than the specification.
The buildings themselves are changing too. One recent office project sits beside a rail corridor with a subway running underneath, and was designed to carry vibration-sensitive laboratory equipment. Mass timber and flanking transmission is an area we follow closely, including participation in the international standards work on how flanking is measured.
We have also worked on the landlord side, including portfolio-wide assessment of a major office landlord’s towers against WELL, and on disputes between tenants in the same building. One involved a co-working floor with exposed structure directly above a law office, where the resolution came from measurement of both airborne and impact sound and a set of recommendations both parties could act on.
Bentham Acoustics is new. Its engineers are not. The projects described here were carried out by Bentham engineers over their careers, at this firm and before it.
A full list of relevant project experience is available on request.
What we work on
Open plan that works for how people work now.
Video calls at the desk have changed the problem. Layout, absorption, screening and sound masking all still apply, but the balance between them is different from the guidance most open plans were designed against.
Meeting rooms that are as private as they look.
Glass fronts, partitions to the ceiling and shared plenums are a solvable combination. Deciding which rooms need real privacy, and which only need to feel separate, is what keeps it affordable.
Mechanical noise, in both directions.
The background level from diffusers and fan coils sets how much can be overheard, so it is a speech privacy decision as much as a comfort one. Rooftop plant and generators have to satisfy the neighbours as well.
Neighbours in the same building.
A gym, a restaurant or residential floors above bring impact noise, exhaust and refrigeration into the conversation, usually before the tenant mix is settled.
Base building and fit-out
The split between base building and fit-out is where most workplace acoustic outcomes are decided, because it is a commercial boundary rather than a technical one.
A base building can be delivered fully compliant and still make good speech privacy expensive to achieve, through slab-to-slab heights, plenum continuity, mechanical selection or curtain wall mullion spacing. None of those are visible to a tenant reviewing a floor plate, and all of them are fixed by the time a fit-out starts.
The useful work sits on either side of that line. For a landlord, setting a base building acoustic standard that makes the space lettable and defensible. For a tenant, understanding what the shell will support before the lease is signed and the layout is drawn.
Standards and requirements in Ontario
There is no code requirement for acoustics in commercial space. The Ontario Building Code’s acoustic provisions are directed at dwelling units, which means workplace criteria come from elsewhere: base building standards, lease schedules, and the project’s own targets.
In practice the reference points are ASHRAE and ANSI criteria for background sound levels, ASTM methods for measuring speech privacy in open and closed plan, and, where a project is pursuing certification, the acoustic requirements in WELL and the acoustic performance credit in LEED. Where a workplace shares a building with residential units, the Code’s requirements apply to those units, and the commercial tenant is often the source being assessed.