Liberal Arts, Arts, and Humanities Building

Shah Smith & Associates, Inc. provided the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design for the Liberal Arts, Arts, and Humanities Building which houses the English Department and Performance Studies, and Theater Arts.

This four-story facility includes department offices, classrooms, seminar rooms, graduate student offices, music practice rooms, recording studio, music teaching labs, costume shop, scene shop, and a 1,500 SF black box theater.

The first floor contains music rooms, rehearsal rooms, recording studios, and a black box theater.  Noise was the critical issue on this floor.  SSA worked very closely with the acoustical consultant and architect to ensure the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems did not produce unwanted noise in these spaces.  The solutions included:

• Sound attenuators on air handling units.
• Oversized duct work to decrease the velocity of air thus reducing noise from the system.
• Vibration isolation on all mechanical equipment to prevent sound transmission through the structure.
• Vibration isolation on all electrical transformers to prevent sound transmission through the structure.

This project was designed in REVIT and a BIM model was created.  After the design development was approved, bi-weekly BIM coordination Webex Meetings were convened by the Contractor.

At these meetings the clash detection list was reviewed and interdiscipline coordination (MEP, Architectural, and Structural) was accomplished.

This process continued through the construction documents phase of the project and resulted in a significantly reduced amount of coordination RFI’s.