Apprentice carpenter James Riach works on the floor of the control room of the recording studio in the new $26 million music, theatre and performing arts development under way at the University of Otago.
Workers have been fixing large massively dense concrete floor panels into place above slab floors, and joiners are crafting more than 780 acoustic boxes to absorb sound in the building, going up behind the Robertson Library in Union Street East.
The development's exterior walls, floors and ceilings needed to be bulky to prevent sound transmitting through them, leading Baker Garden Architects and CCM Architects to design them in concrete. Interior walls and ceilings are triple layers of plasterboard to also limit sound being transmitted, while the interior floor is a concrete panel design.
