Blog

Open-plan, collaborative learning spaces are on the rise in Australian schools, and while this design trend has advantages for students’ social development and teamwork, open-plan classrooms tend to be noisy. This can have a detrimental effect on individual learning, research shows.

Passive House design is gaining popularity in Australia, but is building an airtight dwelling in some of our humid coastal areas not looking for a mould problem down the line?

1. It’s been around for more than a century Plasterboard was manufactured in the UK as early as the mid-nineteenth century, according to the veteran Australia plasterer and plastering teacher Mark Goodchild. The first plasterboard was imported into Australia in the 1890s and used in the construction of a North Sydney cottage, but it was only properly introduced to the local market in the 1940s.

The façade is one of the most recognisable elements of a building and it plays a critical role as the first line of defence against environmental factors that could affect the structure.

Sustainability in the construction industry involves more than just energy efficiency, emissions reduction, recycling and waste management. This is because sustainability is not only about the environmental impact of business activities and decisions, but involves a social aspect (people and society) as well.

Sound impacts our wellbeing, our health and even our mood. Sound also affects our performance and our ability to concentrate. Sound is pretty powerful, so powerful in fact that engineering students of the George Mason University have developed a sonic fire extinguisher that puts out fires with low level sound waves.’ This may not have much to do with reverberation time, but if sound can even beat fire, imagine what other impacts it can have! Read below what you need to know about reverberation time and what you should be aiming at when creating a space in an office, school, home, restaurant and some other typical environments:

Passive House is gaining popularity in Australia as a design principle that can offer healthy, comfortable, low energy and resilient buildings.

The National Construction Code (NCC) includes mandatory regulations relating to condensation management. Several changes were introduced in 2019,  and more were added in NCC2022.

It’s everybody’s worst nightmare – a fire raging through your apartment block, with no room to escape.

Café and restaurant designers face a difficult challenge when designing café interiors: how to create buzz and ambience, while still letting people hear each other speak. Here are the key acoustic considerations.

When you're working on a construction project, whether it's a large commercial build or a home renovation, there are multiple products and services that have to be pulled together to ensure a successful outcome. Combining products from different manufacturers in the overall project is generally not an issue, but what about the situation where the performance of different products is dependent on each other? If something goes wrong in this case, how do you know which product is at fault and how do you go about resolving the issue when you could be faced with having to deal with the "Blame Game"?

Dry, hot weather can lead to a variety of concerns, including higher energy bills and devastating bushfires. It can also lead to cracks appearing in built structures, sometimes overnight.

More than 3,000 properties were destroyed in the 2019-2020 bushfire season, and 33 people have lost their lives. Unfortunately, BOM has just declared an El Niño climate pattern for the 2023-2024 summer period, increasing the chances of another hot and dry season and the heightened risk of dangerous bushfires. This blog looks at some of the strategies that can be employed to make houses more fire resilient.

During the longer days of the summer months, the impact of glancing light becomes more apparent when home owners get to see their beautiful interiors bathed in the natural light of our summer evenings. And, their once-smooth walls take on a life of their own providing a terrain that any mountain-biker would relish.

In 2022 members of the Siniat technical team traveled to the United States to test the Siniat range of seismic ceiling designs on a sophisticated shake table at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Centre (PEER).