ERDA, UTAH
At Stansbury Junior High School, the acoustic ceiling system was built to do two things at once: quiet spaces built for constant group activity, and give each Learning Community its own coordinated identity through color. Across the school’s Learning Communities, the baffles were organized into four distinct color zones, turning the ceiling plane into a functioning piece of architecture rather than a background utility.
CSI Creative supplied Soundcore® Folded Baffles as an approved substitution for the specified basis-of-design system, with each zone developed around architect-selected colors: Chrysocolla, Arctic Ocean, Buckskin, and a fourth ACB4 color originally specified as Sumac. The work demanded more than matching a finish schedule. It required maintaining fidelity between the approved design, field-verified dimensions, mounting conditions, and a November 2024 installation deadline.
MHTN Architects specified four distinct colorways across the Learning Communities at Stansbury Junior High School — SND130 Buckskin (a neutral cream/grey) for ACB1, SND128 Arctic Ocean (navy) for ACB2, SND123 Chrysocolla (a deep teal) for ACB3, and SND811 Sumac (a deep red) for ACB4 — one assigned per zone across Areas D, E, and F. The selections span both saturated, high-contrast tones (Chrysocolla, Arctic Ocean, Sumac) and a quieter neutral (Buckskin), suggesting a deliberate approach to visual wayfinding: giving each Learning Community its own identifiable color against the building’s otherwise neutral painted-gypsum and acoustical ceiling panel palette.
The colors were intended to do more than serve a functional purpose. While the acoustic baffles primarily provide sound control, the color palette also supports the school’s brand and visual identity by creating a consistent, recognizable design language throughout the space. Each color zone gives the Learning Communities a distinct identity and helps with visual wayfinding, allowing students and staff to recognize and navigate different areas more easily. In this project, color therefore functions both as an architectural feature and as a branding tool—reinforcing the school’s identity while maintaining the practical performance of the acoustic system.
The Learning Communities were organized as four color-coded acoustic zones, designated ACB1 through ACB4. Each zone required custom Soundcore® Folded Baffles coordinated to the architect’s selected palette and the dimensions confirmed through the submittal process.
In a ceiling-based acoustic system, small inconsistencies can become highly visible once repeated across a large plane. Color, baffle depth, suspension method, spacing, and orientation all contribute to the visual rhythm of the finished ceiling. For that reason, the project team treated the submittal and shop-drawing process as a design-control phase rather than an administrative step.
Golder Acoustics, the acoustical subcontractor responsible for installing the baffle system, needed four zones of acoustic baffles built to the architect’s exact colors and field dimensions — Buckskin, Arctic Ocean, Chrysocolla, and Sumac across ACB1 through ACB4 — delivered in time to install before a November 2024 date fixed since the start of the year. For Jason Mallory, Golder’s estimator running point on the order, that meant treating every drawing, color confirmation, and shop-drawing markup as something that had to be right the first time, since a mismatch caught late wouldn’t just cost money — it would cost time the schedule couldn’t spare.
The submittal record shows the architect treating color fidelity as part of that same process rather than a formality — when Sumac was later discontinued, MHTN required physical sample comparison against a competing product's exact shade (J2 Systems Red-136) before approving a replacement, rather than accepting a "close enough" match on spec alone.
Want to see these colors in person? Get the SND130 Buckskin, SND128 Arctic Ocean, and SND123 Chrysocolla sample set — reach out to your CSI Rep to request it.
The four baffle zones sit inside working areas built for sustained group use rather than passive circulation — Learning Communities and adjoining Break-Out rooms across Areas D, E, and F, plus the school's Reception and Counseling Reception spaces. These are rooms where overlapping conversation, group instruction, and close-proximity meetings happen continuously throughout the school day, the kind of acoustic environment where an untreated hard ceiling would let noise build and carry between adjacent spaces. Positioning a distinct baffle color in each Learning Community also gives every zone a visual identity of its own, offering a wayfinding cue for students and staff moving between areas that would otherwise share the same finish palette.
Catching a discrepancy before it doubled the cost.The first critical coordination issue emerged during drawing review. Field drawings showed baffles at approximately twice the height listed in the original sales order, along with a different mounting approach. Before the discrepancy could carry into fabrication, Golder Acoustics confirmed that the original 8.68-inch specification governed. That clarification prevented a dimensional and installation conflict from becoming a production issue.
Losing a color mid-project.A second challenge affected the finish schedule. During the approval process, the supplier discontinued Sumac, the color identified for ACB4. The change required the shop drawings to return to the architect for review and a new color decision. With the installation window already established, the team had to protect both design intent and lead time while the approval remained pending for approximately six weeks.
Six weeks with no answer.What followed was six quiet weeks of waiting on architect review, with Jason relaying little more than "still with the architect" each time CSI Creative checked in — time that came directly out of the six-to-eight-week production window the team needed to hit the November install.
Coordinating a color-zoned acoustic ceiling of your own? Send us your reflected ceiling plan and our team will help lay out the zones with you.
Once signed shop drawings were returned in early September 2024, CSI Creative released the package to production. Fabrication ran from September 4 through October 4, followed by shipment on October 10 and 11—leaving approximately one month of schedule float before the school’s November installation window.
Delivery planning was also coordinated around actual site conditions: a commercial jobsite without a loading dock, forklift availability at delivery, and a 24-hour appointment requirement. Although the available records end at shipment and payment confirmation, the sequence shows deliberate preparation to make the material handoff as controlled as the design approval process.
By early September 2024, the shop drawings came back signed — color resolved, dimensions confirmed, six weeks of waiting finally broken. CSI Creative moved the order straight into production, timing the ship date to October 11 so it would clear the jobsite with room to spare before the confirmed November installation. Jason supplied the last details a delivery needs to go smoothly — a commercial site with no loading dock, a forklift standing by, a 24-hour appointment window — and by the second week of October, the baffles were crated, invoiced, and shipped, with final payment mailed the same week. Every problem the project raised — a mismatched drawing, a discontinued color, a stalled approval — got caught and resolved before it could touch the install date Golder had been building toward since January. The finished space bears out the same dual intent the project set out to deliver: four color-coded ceiling zones now anchor the building's shared spaces, doing the acoustic work the Learning Communities needed while giving students and staff a clear, coordinated identity for every zone they move through.
At Stansbury Junior High School, the color-zoned ceiling system now anchors the building's shared spaces — gathering areas, the library, reception, and circulation corridors — each treated with its own baffle color against the surrounding white ceiling grid: deep navy over one lounge area, teal over the library space, a warm rust tone over another gathering node. Rather than disappearing into the architecture, the ceiling reads as a deliberate wayfinding layer, giving students and staff a visual cue for where they are in the building simply by looking up. The result is a set of shared spaces that feel considered rather than incidental — soft seating, wall-mounted displays, and open sightlines to the mountains beyond, all under a ceiling doing real acoustic work without looking like it. For the design community, Stansbury is a working example of a principle that's easy to state and hard to execute well: that acoustic infrastructure in a K-12 building doesn't have to be hidden to be effective, and that a functional requirement — sound control in high-traffic shared spaces — can double as the building's clearest piece of wayfinding and identity.
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