Meeting Interior

A single large room asked to do four jobs, with a budget that allowed for one. The design problem was entirely about what could change in ten minutes and what had to be fixed.

Four configurations

We worked backward from the setups the client actually runs, and tested each one on a scaled plan before specifying anything.

• Board: twenty-four around one table, which is the fixed condition
• Training: six tables of five, facing a screen on the long wall
• Community: chairs in a circle, tables stacked and gone
• Assembly: two hundred seated, tables removed entirely, doors to the adjacent room opened

The table is six sections on locking casters, each light enough for two people. Storage for the sections and for one hundred and eighty stacking chairs is behind a full-height sliding wall on the short end, which was the single most expensive element and the one that makes the room work.

Acoustics

An empty hall with two hundred people in it is unusable without treatment, and a boardroom with hard treatment sounds dead. We ran absorbent panels on the upper half of both long walls only, left the lower half hard for reflection, and hung a fabric-wrapped raft over the center of the room. Reverberation measured at 0.8 seconds, which suits speech at both extremes.

A multipurpose room usually means a room that is slightly wrong for everything. The way out is to pick the two hardest configurations and make those exactly right.

Materials

Rubber floor, which takes chair legs and cleans down. Birch ply to the sliding wall and the storage. Walls in a mid-warm neutral that photographs well, because the room is used for press events and that turned out to matter.

Outcome

Eleven weeks including the sliding wall installation. The client has run every configuration at least six times and has not asked for a single change.

Storage is the real design

The sliding wall takes the six table sections and one hundred and eighty stacked chairs behind a single plane, which is what allows the room to change character in ten minutes. It absorbed nearly a quarter of the budget and every other decision in the scheme depended on it existing.