The Role of Façades in the Composition of Urban Soundscapes

As cities continue to expand and densify, understanding how buildings affect people’s perception and experience of the acoustic environment in context becomes more relevant. This paper presents a conceptual framework of the influ-ence of façades on the urban soundscape, based on the ISO 12913 series, in order to analyze the three main elements of the soundscape: people, acoustic environ-ment and context, along with façade as a fourth element. The methodology in-cluded literature review, as well as an exploration of the ISO 12913 methods for soundscape assessment via soundwalks and laboratory experiments involving a total of forty-three (n = 43) participants. The results provide a promising frame-work for façade analysis to progress toward the integration of human-centered approaches into the field of façade acoustics and complement current building physics practice.