By Justin Bachman

Loud design and quiet rooms at JFK International Airport.

May 16, 2019 – The retro-chic TWA Hotel at John F. Kennedy International Airport wants you to think of the Rat Pack, the Beatles, and the soaring grace of Eero Saarinen’s futuristic terminal, dedicated to the then-new Jet Age.

What the hotel doesn’t want is for guests to hear even a murmur of jet engine noise from adjacent taxiways. To achieve this solitude, the designers sheathed both wings of the new 512-room hotel with a 4.5-inch glass curtain wall, second-thickest in the world, to hush JFK’s madding bustle.

Draw shut the blackout shades in every room, and you’re in a virtually silent chamber save for the low whoosh of air conditioning. Jet engine noise and auto traffic at the adjacent Terminal 5 won’t be an issue. “We want to give you the experience of aviation without making you hear it,” says Erik Palmer, the hotel’s managing director.

What that glass curtain couldn’t silence: a chorus of complaints on the first night. The TWA Hotel opened its doors to customers on Wednesday with abundant kinks to exterminate and a deep sense that things could have been much, much smoother had the hotel waited a week or two to complete its finishing touches, 57 years nearly to the date that Saarinen’s original Trans World Flight Center was dedicated on May 28.

Many of the elevators went on strike around 4 p.m., just as the first guests checked in; the cashless hotel suffered glitchy point-of-sale system processing as servers tried to ring up drink orders, while the rooftop infinity pool deck was off-limits because construction isn’t finished. (The pool itself is ready, though.)

The hotel has returned the TWA Flight Center’s original Lisbon Lounge for cocktails, as well as Paris Café, the latter run by celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. A restored Lockheed Constellation painted in TWA’s livery sits outside the glass-walled lobby as a year-round cocktail lounge. In total there’s a restaurant, three bars, and a food hall, in varying states of readiness on opening day.

The 1960s design motifs extend to the guest rooms, which are geared to inspire visions of 1962, the year of the first Jetsons episode, a time when Boeing Co.’s 707 was rapidly supplanting propellers for a speedier, more glamorous form of air travel.

The rooms feature dark wood, red chairs or a red seating platform, and a terrazzo tile entrance foyer. The tile is a re-creation of the design pattern used at St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, another Saarinen icon completed in the 1960s. Each room has a black rotary-dial telephone, a well-stocked cocktail minibar—including Tab soda—a jar of sharpened red No. 2 pencils, and lamps of ’60s-era design. Bathrooms include Frette towels and washcloths.

Among the hotel’s best amenities: blazing-fast Wi-Fi throughout, likely faster than whatever you have at home. (Download speeds top out near 400 megabits per second.) “We paid extra for that,” Palmer quips—and so do guests, via a mandatory $10 resort fee.

The hotel also includes 50,000 square feet of event space. Weddings, bar or bat mitzvahs, and corporate meetings are the primary sales targets. JetBlue Airways Corp. will be the first large-event customer, with a sit-down dinner for 500 on May 16.

As you’d expect, rooms have that “new hotel smell,” and despite the location at a busy, 24-hour airport, guests can enjoy a fine rest in king- or double-bed rooms, so long as the housekeeping staff aren’t overly chatty. There are also suites. And all should succeed in offering quiet.

The hotel’s developer, MCR Development LLC, has 94 hotels in 24 states and spent months evaluating the proper “aesthetic” for the rooms’ sound design. How to eliminate airport noise was, of course, a key consideration, says Victoria Cerami, chief executive officer of Cerami & Associates, the acoustical design firm that worked on the project. She notes that the glass wall encircling the two room wings—dubbed Hughes and Saarinen—comprises seven panes, making it thicker than any other glass curtain wall aside from that of the U.S. Embassy in London.

Most people don’t notice their sound environment “unless you become annoyed, and once you’re annoyed, you become hypervigilant” to the particular sounds causing your displeasure, Cerami says, sitting in a sound-isolated listening booth constructed inside the firm’s Midtown Manhattan office.

The booth is akin to a recording studio, but one where clients can listen to the various effects of different materials architects use to shape and tame an acoustic environment. The field of acoustic engineering has experienced dramatic growth because of its importance to office buildings, hotels, and hospitals.

“People think about their space in a much more sophisticated way” than in the past, Cerami says. She declined to reveal costs of the overall $300 million project but noted that acoustic design and engineering typically make up less than 1% of a project budget.

Once all the rough edges are smoothed, and the staff find their groove, the hotel will be a nice experience for the sort of traveler who wants a certain no-nonsense aesthetic and doesn’t mind New York prices. (Hello, $6 cup of average drip coffee to go.)

TWA Hotel rates start at $249, with discounts for advanced payment; the hotel also offers four 12-hour partial-day options for weary travelers wanting a nap, from $149. Premium rooms with runway views are more expensive. The TWA is not a luxurious hotel—you’ll get in-room Pringles and a box of Junior Mints but no room service, for example—nor is it trying to be.

What it does offer is an homage to a past era of aviation, restful sleep in quiet rooms, and the kind of marketable “story” with Instagrammable photos, like snapping a shot while sipping a cocktail inside a Lockheed Connie delivered to TWA in 1958.

 

By John Hauenstein, principal, Cerami Associates

Today, there’s a heightened sensitivity to noise and vibration, creating an increased demand for buildings to provide quieter working and living environments. Building managers are barraged with complaints regarding rumbling elevators, whirring air conditioners, construction site vibration and thumping fitness studios. Cerami Site Assessments, a division of Cerami Associates, is a team of acoustical engineers who can troubleshoot noise issues on-site and help develop recommendations for cost-effective solutions.
We work with facility managers to discover their pain points and creatively search for solutions to bring relief. We can tailor solutions to reduce noise and vibration in a way that’s sensitive to their affected stakeholders and those living or working in the building.

Cerami Site Assessments provides noise assessment and remediation services for a wide range of facilities, including commercial, residential, research institutions, fitness studios, senior centers, restaurants and retail stores. After all, noise is a serious problem and one that can literally make you sick. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), noise is the second largest environmental cause of health problems, just after the impact of air quality.

We’ve been in the business of acoustic design for over 50 years, consulting with developers and architects on skyscrapers and supertalls, hospitals, museums, restaurants and every building that wants a signature sound. More recently, with noise complaints in NYC reaching an all-time high, we’ve grown our site assessment specialty to investigate ad hoc problems and provide solutions on-site and in real time.

For example, the facility manager of a mid-town mixed-use building called Cerami Site Assessments regarding complaints from tenants hearing intermittent rumbling coming from the ground floor. Cerami’s Site Assessment team investigated the noise complaints and determined that the noise was heard mostly during the morning. A bakery was located directly below the source of the complaints and took deliveries in the morning, so a survey was conducted during a scheduled delivery to determine the noise impact. After assessing the noise and vibration levels, it was clear that vibrational energy was entering the building structure as carts were dragging against the floor and running over irregularities and bumps in the floor. It was determined that modification to the existing loading equipment would be the easiest and most feasible way to reduce the noise impact, without having to implement any construction methods that would have been costly and less effective.

In another instance, the owner of a major mixed-use building went through an ambitious effort to replace the cooling towers for a 58-story, fully-occupied building. Yet, the operation of the new energy-efficient equipment resulted in noise complaints in apartments overlooking the roof containing the cooling towers. Cerami Site Assessments was called in to determine if noise levels exceeded the city noise code and to help with noise mitigation efforts. Based on multiple test iterations, it was determined that the system was not operating properly during off-peak hours. The Cerami team worked with the design engineers and manufacturers to quiet things down by replacing defective components, establishing maximum operating speeds and installing equipment to direct noise away from the residential tower.