Examination of acoustic comfort criteria in open plan office buildings: An office building example in İzmir

Employees of open plan offices are distracted easier and reduced speech privacy, if the acoustic comfort conditions are not acceptable. In the scope of the thesis, acoustical comfort conditions were examined in the open plan offices chosen as an example and it was evaluated whether they could meet the specified limit values and the offices with different architectural features were compared in themselves. The physical conditions of the office samples which were constructed in recent years and were exemplary in terms of architectural features of open-plan offices were examined. In the offices where fieldwork was conducted between these offices, acoustical evaluations were made considering the limit values in the acoustic parameters obtained as a result of literature review. In the first part of the study, an introduction to the subject of the thesis is given. The scope and the method of the study have been indicated by comparison in the offices where the dimensions are approximately the same but the surfaces and working arrangements are different. In the second part, office diversification according to the historical development of office buildings and space arrangement is briefly mentioned. User requirements in open plan offices are specified. Information was given about the architectural features of the three recently designed open-plan offices and the acoustic comfort conditions examined and compared each other within the scope of the thesis. In the third chapter, national and international studies which are taken as a guide during the thesis study are summarized briefly and examples of open plan offices are examined. The room acoustics parameters used in the thesis are briefly given and the measurement results are examined within these parameters. In the fourth chapter, results of user satisfaction surveys in open-plan offices were evaluated subjectively and the acoustic comfort conditions in the open plan offices are examined objectively.. The effects of architectural differences on acoustic comfort conditions of the same sized open-plan offices evaluated and survey results were compared. In the fifth chapter, the results and recommendations after the evaluation of the acoustic parameters to must be obtained in order to ensure the auditory privacy of the employees have been given in the offices, where surveys and acoustic parameters are examined as well as architectural requirements within the scope of the thesis while the noise level in the environment is within the desired limit values.