Belmont Day School – The Barn

The 27,000 square foot building, designed by Utile, contains multi-discipline spaces, including a basketball court, locker rooms, offices, and classrooms for the School’s developing STEAM programs. Acentech provided Utile with acoustics consulting services to ensure the spaces worked in complete harmony.

Utile designed the Barn while keeping the initiative of creating flexible, functional spaces in mind. Two dual-use basketball courts are contained in a 14,000 square foot fieldhouse. Large, glass garage doors invite the outside in and connect the campus at large with the Barn. The rest of the structure is a two-story headhouse containing locker rooms, offices, and five workshop-style classrooms. These classrooms are home to the school’s STEAM programs and include laboratory and technology spaces. Bridging the gap between athletics and education are multiple breakout spaces with large windows overlooking the basketball courts, once again, embracing connectivity.

Acentech collaborated with the entire design team to ensure all the spaces functioned as intended. Our consultants collaborated with the architect to ensure that the reverberation time and noise built up were controlled in the gymnasium’s large volume. We also provided recommendations for room finishes and sound isolation in the classrooms and office spaces, to achieve suitable speech privacy between rooms, and high speech intelligibility in the classrooms. Finally, we partnered with the MEP team to achieve suitably quite background noise levels throughout the building and to ensure that the local noise ordinance was met, and exterior noise would not present a concern for the School’s neighbors. The Barn is now an integral part of the Belmont Day school campus, working in harmony, internally and externally.