City Council Chambers – Lawndale, CA


Architect: Michael Merino Architects
Consultant: AMT Systems Inc.
Installation: AMT Systems Inc.
Programming: AMT Systems Inc.

Description of project

The small community of Lawndale, California is located just east of the 405 freeway, south of Los Angeles International Airport. This thriving part of greater Los Angeles is home to a melting pot of ethnicities, and guided by a dedicated group of council members and staff dealing with the everyday business of urban living.

A major renovation of an existing building housing the council chambers and many of the city services made possible a series of sweeping architectural improvements that updated the building inside and out. The chamber facelift included a complete new ceiling and wall treatment, public seating arrangement, and a totally revised and improved council dais and staff work area.

AMT Systems worked with the city planners and the architect to provide a system of sound and video components to serve both the public audience and the community broadcast service. The system includes individual microphones with membrane mute switches and indicator LEDs for all dais and staff positions, touch sensitive voting panels, and individual color monitors for each dais seat with both motion and graphics capabilities. A touch screen-based control system operates the speaker timer, request-to-speak, and voting programs, all custom engineered and written by AMT staff personnel. Duplicate touch screens allow either the Mayor or City Clerk to operate these functions, as well as to control video projection from a ceiling mounted LCD projector for playback of pre-recorded materials or display of graphics from a document camera or computer. The dais and public access lectern microphones are controlled by automatic mixer channels for sound reinforcement within the chamber to the audience area. Direct outputs of the dais microphones as well as ceiling mounted audience microphones provide isolated and independent control of audio for the broadcast audio engineer to use with video from three remotely controlled video cameras that feed a live signal from the chamber via microwave to the local cable access channel.