HBO Screening Room
New York, NY

Seat Count: 79
Opening: 1995
Cost: $3 Million
Area: 1,500 square feet
Client: Home Box Office
Architect: Ohlhausen, DuBois Architects
AD Scope: Acoustics, Sound Isolation,
Noise Control

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HBO’s main headquarters in New York City now features a state-of-the-art screening room and board room. AD was brought on as part of the design team to provide acoustics, sound isolation and noise control consulting services for the high-profile rooms.

The new Screening Room, located on the upper two floors of the headquarters building, adapted the existing structure for reuse. A raked seating configuration, optimum for film presentations, was enabled by partially removing the 15th Floor slab. The resulting space configuration and location within the building presented several acoustical design challenges.

Located directly below the rooftop air handling equipment and adjacent to the main building supply air shaft, AD designed a room-in-room isolated construction to protect the Screening Room from base building equipment noise sources.
In addition, the south side of the space faces a major NYC thoroughfare (42nd Street), requiring custom acoustically-sealed access panels with hidden hardware. These panels were carefully designed to achieve a uniform interior wall finish while permitting window service access.

The limited area available for the renovation resulted in the need to run HVAC ductwork serving the Screening Room from the rooftop air handling unit through the base building mechanical penthouse. Air is supplied in two soffits on either side of the space. Meticulous control of air velocities in the design and substantial field work alongside the air balancer was required to ensure the completed facility met the stringent background noise design goal.

Control of the room’s interior room acoustic is provided by a series of absorptive, reflective and diffusive panels and decorative elements. AD worked carefully with the architect to ensure these treatments were integrated into the overall design aesthetic of the room. These wall and ceiling panels were also carefully coordinated with lighting and loudspeakers to ensure optimum control of direct, reflected, and reverberant sound energy.