More than 40 years after engineering the Sydney Opera House, the interdisciplinary firm Arup is fine-tuning architectural sound performance with the latest modeling technology, reports principal Raj Patel. The U.S. Courthouse for the District of Utah, in Salt Lake City, was designed using Arup’s SoundLab, in which recordings are utilized to create an aural rendering of a room’s acoustics. “From the moment of creation to the moment of perception, sound is augmented and transformed by the shapes, forms, volumes, and materials around us,” says Raj Patel, Principal and Global Leader of Acoustics at Arup.
