The booming party walls being constructed in the skyscrapers of Toronto

Abstract

With eight new 300 m or higher buildings and another ninety shorter skyscrapers either under construction or proposed for the booming Toronto real estate market, there is no shortage of work for acoustic consultants in Toronto at the moment. Most of the high-rise buildings allocated for residential use include concrete floors and ceilings, glass curtain walls, and lightweight, steel stud gypsum board interior walls. A party wall design that has become popular among architects is a double steel stud wall with one or more layers of gypsum board attached to the studs in the gap between the rows of studs in addition to the gypsum board attached to the exterior of the studs. Typically, the transmission loss values for the wall designs used to demonstrate compliance with the building code are those for single stud walls with equivalent stud gauges and numbers of exterior layers of gypsum board. Due to the lack of available data, the National Research Council of Canada measured the transmission loss of many of these wall designs and found that adding the gypsum board in the cavity between the rows of studs has a significant effect on the transmission loss below 200 Hz.