The Lake View – Solent Circuit, Australia

The Hospital for Specialist Surgery (HSS) is a private hospital in Baulkham Hills overlooking Norwest Lake at Bella Vista, Sydney. The project involved the redevelopment of an existing 5 level building, transforming it into a high quality medical and surgical centre and maintaining most of the building envelope, part of the internal spaces, such as cores, toilets and ground floor meeting rooms and the existing mechanical equipment. Due to limitations in the existing floor to ceiling heights of the building, 10 operating spaces were located on the top floor, where the roof was raised to allow for the required room clearances and dedicated air conditioning systems. Additional mechanical equipment has been added in response to the need of an increased mechanical capacity. The seven-storey building at 17-19 Solent Circuit covers 12,000m2 and includes a large conference centre to facilitate teaching and affiliation with universities. It has a dedicated day surgery wing with four operating theatres as well as six major operating theatres, 42 surgical beds, 36 inpatient rehabilitation beds and three high-dependency units. It also has on-site radiology, a hydrotherapy pool and spa. The acoustic design focussed on the review of the building envelope to make sure the existing façade glazing would have been suitable to achieve the noise intrusive levels, considering the existing traffic noise and aircraft noise. In addition, the internal sound insulation has been considered to achieve the requested level of privacy, the local Standards and to make sure that spaces are not adversely affected by noise from adjacent parts of the building. Building services noise has also been controlled to achieve the background noise targets within spaces as well as the limiting criteria at the nearest noise sensitive receivers established by the New South Wales Environment Protection Authority Industrial Noise Policy (INP). Specific vibration targets and related design have been provided for vibration-sensitive areas such as laboratories including sensitive equipment. Finally, the room acoustics within the main spaces have been considered, such as office areas, laboratories, atrium and circulation areas.