Project Type: Government

Social Services Center
Camden, NJ
Architect: USA Architects

This is a project involving both new construction as well as the renovation of an existing one-story office building already on the site in Camden, New Jersey. When complete, the 180,000 square foot office center will house the Social Service Center, a state-of-the art office, classroom, conference, and support space facility for county programs and affiliated state agencies. The Center will provide financial assistance services, food stamps, child support, Medicaid, and social services to the community, and is projected to be a vital and busy hub of activity.

Metropolitan Acoustics was brought on board to outline the design goals for acoustical isolation, speech privacy, reverberation times in the conference rooms and public gathering areas, and to provide background sound level analysis throughout a variety of spaces in the facility. We worked with the architects to troubleshoot potential sound isolation issues such as noise-sensitive adjacencies and noise transmission from mechanical and HVAC equipment.

There are a number of functions in the building that require privacy, and we worked with the construction documents to review the locations of closed rooms and provide recommendations for materials, construction, and finishes to address the spaces with critical speech privacy needs. We also reviewed the plans for all the open office areas and provided recommendations to achieve appropriate speech privacy between work stations.