Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Oh, no! (Ceilings Div)

[Elana Kann (elanakann]

At Westwood community we used Tectum for the 2-story ceiling/roof of our
entire common house, over a post-and-beam support system. In the
dining/dance room this makes a fairly high steep cathedral ceiling. It is
spacious, gracious, beautiful, and provides sound absorption that makes it
possible to carry on conversations even with a lot of people in the room.
It has been a huge success.

Tectum is a panel product with woven threads of wood as the inside layer
for sound absorption, several inches of foam in the middle for insulation,
and sheathing on the outside layer to receive roof shingles. It is
basically a stress skin panel over post-and-beam construction. The
combination of the beams showing and the woven wood texture of the ceiling
is delightful. And as an additional bonus, there is virtually no air
leakage through the roof.

--Elana Kann
Westwood CoHousing Community
Asheville, NC



At 06:55 PM 6/17/98 -0500, you wrote:
>It's that ceiling thing again!
>
>The responses have left many of us with the impression that two-story
>dining rooms are better than one-story ones, but that existing two-story
>dining rooms either have not been well-designed, or else acoustically
>smart designs by architects have been compromised by cost-conscious
>builders: the problem is acoustic only.  One-story dining rooms are
>compared to high school cafeterias and church basements.  And what about
>dances and such?
>
>Paul Kilduff
>Liberty Village, Maryland
>.
>