Casa Cor 2006

Overview

Once a year, the top 10 Brazilian’s cities gather the most respected architects and interior designers for the greatest design show called Casa Cor. Usually, one or two houses (three for this year) get to be remodeled and each architect gets to design a different room in the house.

From August 27th thru September 27, the city of Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais, where the Brazilian WSDG office is located, is the host of 20th Casa Cor.

For the third time in a row, WSDG is responsible for the acoustical quality of two different spaces. This year we are helping a very respected architect, Gislene Lopes, to bring the appropriate sound balance to the environments she has created.

One of the spaces is the Living Room, equipped with a 50” plasma monitor and a 5.1 sound system, where we designed and built a large broadband diffuser that can scatter sound frequencies from 250Hz up to 11kHz due to the size and orientation of 1200sq.ft. of recycled wood slats, mounted vertically to the back wall of the room. The idea was to create and element that could perform well acoustically but not look like and acoustical treatment.

Broadband frequency absorption was also obtained by the installation of some insulation boards behind the curtain with some air space behind them, and a heavy carpet also helps with the high frequency absorption. The result is very balanced frequency and time response around the room.

The second space we have worked on was a store called Artefacto. To create a better sounding environment for the 5.1 audio system installed, we created a fabric wall that acts like a broadband absorber, for low-mids and high frequencies. The panels are made of fiberglass, mounted with 5” space behind them.