A first site visit takes a day, a starter pistol and twelve microphones.
Clients often expect the first meeting to be about finishes. It is about noise. Before we discuss timber or plaster we need to know what the site already sounds like.
Outside
We record the site for a full day and night: traffic, trains, aircraft, the ventilation plant on the roof next door. The loudest ten minutes set the weight of the walls.
Inside
If a building already exists, we fire a starter pistol in it and record the decay at twelve positions. The recording tells us how long each frequency lingers and which surfaces are sending it back.
Only then do we draw. A good half of what we propose in the first month comes from those two days of listening, and most of it is invisible in the finished room.