Alternative Spaces for Learning: Reversible Acoustic Treatments for Transformation of Spaces into Classrooms During COVID Era

The design of acoustic comfort in classrooms is a challenging issue. It became a crucial aspect during the Covid-19 pandemic regarding class life organization, as for the latter large spaces for teaching were required in order to guarantee the minimum distance between the occupants to limit the spread of Covid-19, and it was important to ensure their acoustics functionality for the performance of lessons. To this aim, this investigation is to provide a guide (for school principals, administrators, safety managers, architects and engineers, acousticians) where easily implementable solutions for different types of school buildings are detailed in various case studies and they are an example in case of environments similar in shape and volume. In particular the focus is put on the transformation of school spaces created for different purposes than normal classrooms (e.g., corridors, atria, sports halls) into classrooms for teaching. Different layouts of the furniture and sound-absorbing materials have been applied and analysed by simulations (Odeon 15) comparing the results with the standardized optimal values and with those of the actual environments obtained through an extensive measurement campaign. Eight schools were taken into account as case studies, representing the Italian school heritage and including elementary schools, middle schools and high schools. A total of 26 different spaces with a volume varying in the range 135-2800 m3 were analysed. For each of them, both general analyses at the overall environment level and more specific ones for single receivers located over the area occupied by the students were carried out. As a result, it should be highlighted that the proposed solutions could not be fully acoustically optimized for all of the spaces, as the analyses also took into consideration an affordable cost, the speed of realization and the reversibility of the intervention.