Insights from the 2026 ASHRAE Annual Conference: Designing for Outdoor Thermal Comfort
Key takeaways from RWDI's ASHRAE 2026 presentation on designing cooler, more comfortable, and climate-resilient outdoor spaces.
Sector: Entertainment & Hospitality
Create Unforgettable Experiences with Exceptional Spaces
Stand out from the crowd
Transforming bold ideas into reality, ensures your venues are not just structures, but immersive environments that captivate and delight guests and travelers.
From concept to completion, leverage our expertise in climate and performance engineering to help you build a space that is comfortable, efficient, and truly extraordinary. Whether you’re developing a world-class resort, a cutting-edge theme park, or a luxurious hotel, we help you push the boundaries of what’s possible, turning your dreams into destinations that leave lasting impressions.
Addressing entertainment & hospitality challenges
Entertainment venues are masterpieces of complex design, blending cutting-edge technology with innovative architecture to create immersive experiences. These spaces must accommodate diverse performances, audiences, and activities, making versatility and functionality essential. The interplay of aesthetics and acoustics transforms each venue into a dynamic environment that captivates and engages. Ensuring structural performance, optimal guest experiences, while minimizing operational inefficiencies and cost is critical for successful venues that steal the show.
The right insights at the right time
From design to daily operations, we have the right experience and expertise to solve any challenges in the entertainment and hospitality sector. Explore services for every stage of the venue lifecycle.
Services
- Environmental air quality, water, soil, waste
- Pedestrian wind, thermal comfort & safety
- Noise & vibration
- Energy, sustainability & wellness goals
Services
- Pedestrian wind, thermal comfort & safety
- Acoustics, noise & vibration
- Energy, sustainability & wellness, modelling and certification
- Solar effects (sun, shadow, glare, reflection, views, daylighting)
- Snow, ice, rain, sand (loading or management)
- Enclosures
- Structural, cladding, paver & furniture wind
- Aeroacoustics
- Exhaust dispersion
- Stack effect, door pressures & operability
- Smoke and internal ventilation
- Commissioning (enclosure and MEP)
Services
- Air, water, soil or waste quality monitoring
- Enclosure commissioning
- Construction stage wind loading
- Weather forecasting
- MEP commissioning
- Noise & vibration monitoring
- Wind-blown dust management
Services
- Air quality monitoring
- Decarbonization consulting
- Energy & water modeling
- GHG emission inventories
- HVAC performance verification
- Re-, retro-, or continuous commissioning
- Noise & vibration monitoring
- Operational sustainability certifications
Services
- Environmental (air quality, water, soil, waste)
- Pedestrian wind, comfort & safety (including urban heat island, pedestrian ventilation, and natural ventilation)
- Acoustics, noise & vibration
- Energy, sustainability & wellness, modelling and certification
- Solar effects (sun, shadow, glare, reflection, views, daylighting)
- Snow, ice, rain, sand (loading or management)
- Enclosures
- Structural, cladding, paver & furniture wind
- Exhaust dispersion wind
- Stack effect, door pressures & operability
- Smoke and internal ventilation
- Commissioning (enclosure and MEP)
Services
- Environmental air quality, water, soil, waste
- Pedestrian wind, thermal comfort & safety
- Noise & vibration
- Energy, sustainability & wellness goals
Services
- Pedestrian wind, thermal comfort & safety
- Acoustics, noise & vibration
- Energy, sustainability & wellness, modelling and certification
- Solar effects (sun, shadow, glare, reflection, views, daylighting)
- Snow, ice, rain, sand (loading or management)
- Enclosures
- Structural, cladding, paver & furniture wind
- Aeroacoustics
- Exhaust dispersion
- Stack effect, door pressures & operability
- Smoke and internal ventilation
- Commissioning (enclosure and MEP)
Services
- Air, water, soil or waste quality monitoring
- Enclosure commissioning
- Construction stage wind loading
- Weather forecasting
- MEP commissioning
- Noise & vibration monitoring
- Wind-blown dust management
Services
- Air quality monitoring
- Decarbonization consulting
- Energy & water modeling
- GHG emission inventories
- HVAC performance verification
- Re-, retro-, or continuous commissioning
- Noise & vibration monitoring
- Operational sustainability certifications
Services
- Environmental (air quality, water, soil, waste)
- Pedestrian wind, comfort & safety (including urban heat island, pedestrian ventilation, and natural ventilation)
- Acoustics, noise & vibration
- Energy, sustainability & wellness, modelling and certification
- Solar effects (sun, shadow, glare, reflection, views, daylighting)
- Snow, ice, rain, sand (loading or management)
- Enclosures
- Structural, cladding, paver & furniture wind
- Exhaust dispersion wind
- Stack effect, door pressures & operability
- Smoke and internal ventilation
- Commissioning (enclosure and MEP)
Asia Pacific
Qingdao Haitian Hotel
Ingenious solutions in building science, including the world’s first irregular tuned sloshing damper, give the city of Qingdao a showpiece development
United States
Madison Square Garden
Reducing movement and vibration in bridges suspended from a stadium roof
United States
San Diego Convention Center
Insightful direction advances a convention center’s goal of continuous sustainability improvements
How we help
We collaborate and support your vision with technical expertise across every climate and performance engineering discipline. Create more welcoming destinations that exist in harmony with their environment and community.
Optimizing guest comfort and overall experience creates more welcoming and functional spaces for all. Whether its acoustic management, climate-responsive design, thermal comfort, air quality, or sustainability, our expertise in all areas of guest comfort will set your venue apart from the crowd.
Achieve ambitious performance goals, from energy efficiency to equipment longevity, by improving your building’s efficiency and operational excellence.
Mitigating potential hazards and enhancing structural integrity is crucial for safe operations. Our comprehensive analyses allow you to create safer environments by identifying and addressing risks related to wind effects, vibration, and other environmental factors. This reduces the likelihood of structural issues and ensures guest safety.
Our early-stage consulting and commissioning services help you avoid expensive late-stage changes and realize significant operational cost savings.
We streamline your regulatory processes. Our team’s technical expertise and regulatory knowledge help you efficiently navigate complex local requirements and fulfill multi-disciplinary compliance standards. This ensures your projects meet necessary approvals and certifications, avoiding delays and minimizing risk.
Holistic engineering solutions
Entertainment and hospitality design challenges are complex. Our holistic suite of services offers climate responsive design and human-centric solutions that maximize performance and minimize impact.
Experience design for guest comfort
We help balance guest comfort with cost-effective solutions. By analyzing every detail like temperature, air flow, and acoustics, we enable you to create inviting spaces that enhance guest experience while minimizing operational expenses. This extends to outdoor spaces as well, including pools and patios and other outdoor amenities, where we can analyze and improve guest thermal comfort, and the effects of the sun and wind for peak holiday enjoyment. Our human-centric design approach puts experience design front and center to help create memorable, immersive, and multi-sensory experiences that will set your project apart.
Niche engineering services
We fill gaps in architectural teams by providing niche expertise for unique design challenges. Our specialized knowledge allows us to address complex issues that may arise in ambitious entertainment and hospitality projects. From sound control and optimization, temperature control in large spaces, sustainable design, and structural engineering for unique shapes or structures, we have the expertise to address it.
Risk mitigation and performance enhancements
Entertainment and hospitality projects often incorporate distinctive elements such as unique roofs, video screens, or sculptures. Understanding how the local climate will interact with these features is vital to minimizing risks and maximizing performance. By fully optimizing unique architectural features, you can create memorable venues that are not only visually striking but also safe, efficient, and resilient to various environmental challenges.
Support for acoustics in entertainment and performance spaces
A well-designed acoustic environment is essential for delivering a world-class auditory experience. Theatres, concert halls, performance venues, even broadcast and recording studios, and music academies, all require maintaining a high standard of sound fidelity, which is important for producing and delivering performances and media content that is both technically flawless and artistically impactful. Our acoustic consultants specialize in recording spaces, who can ensure accurate sound isolation and control that are essential to prevent external noise interference and ensure clean, undistorted recordings. For live performance spaces, we ensure proper acoustics that allow sound to be evenly distributed, eliminating echoes or distortions, and enhancing clarity, balance, and volume, regardless of the size of the space. Our expertise in acoustical excellence will ensure your venue delivers superior sound quality night after night.
Top 5 related services
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FAQs about our entertainment & hospitality services
Still have questions? Contact us.
We have worked on theaters and entertainment halls, concert halls, nightclubs, recording studios, broadcast studios, theme parks, cinemas, conference centers, casinos, hotels, resorts, and other vacation destinations.
We engineer acoustics to suit the intended use of each space—whether it’s for live music, spoken word, or ambient guest comfort. For venues such as theaters, concert halls, and cinemas, we can help control sound quality, manage acoustics, and ensure that sound reaches all areas evenly and with high clarity. We can also ensure that external noise is kept to a minimum.
For venues like recording studios, nightclubs, and hotels with entertainment facilities, we can ensure proper soundproofing to prevent noise leakage that might disturb other areas or neighboring buildings. Our team models sound behavior to fine-tune reverberation, speech clarity, and noise control, ensuring immersive audio experiences in theaters and event venues, as well as quiet, restful atmospheres in hospitality settings.
We analyze occupancy patterns, HVAC performance, and microclimate conditions to deliver systems that maintain consistent indoor temperatures, fresh air, and humidity control—even during peak usage. This enhances guest comfort, supports wellness goals, and ensures efficient operation across hotel rooms, lobbies, and dining areas.
Through wind tunnel testing and computational modeling, we design outdoor spaces that are comfortable and safe, even in challenging climates. Our solutions mitigate wind-driven discomfort on terraces, pool decks, or open-air venues, while protecting structures from wind-related wear and risk.
We provide discreet, performance-driven upgrades—such as energy-efficient HVAC retrofits, smart controls, envelope improvements, and renewable energy integration. These strategies lower energy use and operational costs while maintaining the look, feel, and comfort standards expected in high-end hospitality environments.
We address both environmental comfort and safety through optimized airflow, temperature control, noise mitigation, and code-compliant egress planning. Our human-centric design approach ensures safe, enjoyable experiences for every visitor.
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