Australia’s brightest and best new buildings use state-of-the-art technology to cut costs and make employees happy.
CFO 01 April 2004.
Tenants want at least three benefits from new office buildings – efficient floor spaces, environmental sustainability and the chance for employees to control their local environment, including the air they breathe. New high-tech buildings offer all these in flexible workplaces that feature winter gardens, fresh air, plasma screens, chilled beams and light sensors.
With Melbourne coming to the end of a building boom, many of the brightest and best new buildings in Australia are in or around its CBD. Brisbane has a few new buildings, the most notable being MacArthur Tower in Queen Street. The Riparian Plaza, designed by Harry Seidler, has been delayed until the second half of 2004.
But the showcase building in Australia is Lend Lease’s new headquarters in Sydney, rated at five stars by the Australian Building Green House scheme. All these buildings use the latest in light and sensor technology to reduce energy costs. KPMG’s new offices in Sydney (see case study) come a close second.
Lend Lease’s building goes one step further by reducing the lux from its lighting to save energy, while still providing enough light for comfort. The building includes winter gardens, terraces and windows that will open. Lend Lease claims that with all the sophisticated energy-saving technology packed into the building it will save money on running costs.
The building will run on fresh air rather than air-conditioning for most of the year, due to its energy efficiency combined with chilled beam cooling technology – the first time such technology has been used in Australia. The system channels chilled water through the ceilings to control the temperature of the building’s concrete slabs, and in doing so, helps to manage the building’s overall temperature. As hot air rises, the chilled water running through the ceiling cools it. The system takes time to adjust to changes, and is not suitable in environments where there are frequent and significant variations in temperature. Lend Lease’s headquarters benefit from Sydney’s harborside breezes.
For Lend Lease, the chilled beam technology has allowed the building’s designers to place a garden on the roof, rather than the usual ugly air-conditioning plant.
Lend Lease’s client representative on the project, Laurel Robinson, says the system brings better air quality. The fact that the company has replaced all its cathode ray tube computer monitors with flat screens has helped cut the heat load in the building, a move adopted by many other energy-conscious tenants.
Bill Dowzer, from design firm Bligh Voller Nield, says the chilled beams technology has been examined for a number of projects, including National Australia Bank’s building in Melbourne’s Docklands, but it can be inflexible and lack instant control. Bendigo Bank is investigating the possibility of using chilled beams in its headquarters development in its hometown, where temperatures are either hot in the summer or cold in the winter, but vary little during those periods.
The second building to use chilled beams in Australia will be Melbourne City Council’s headquarters, known as CH2 (Council Headquarters 2), being built on Little Collins Street. Its high level of sustainability will be supported by obligatory winter and roof gardens.
CH2 will use only 13 per cent of the energy used at the existing headquarters and will cost only $36 per metre to run, saving $270,000 a year. Water consumption will be halved. Staff will be treated to natural light and ventilation, which the council says will cut the spread of bacteria and illness and save an estimated $200,000 a year on sick leave and result in productivity improvements of between one and 4.9 per cent.
Bligh Voller Nield designed the NAB’s seven-storey headquarters, dubbed the Rubik’s Cube, in Melbourne’s Docklands with air quality as a priority. In February the first wave of employees – 3500 – began their move into the brightly colored patchwork of a building. In the second phase, 3800 employees will move in August.
Mark Rada, development manager for Lend Lease on the Victoria Harbor project, believes the NAB building is possibly one of the most exciting commercial buildings ever to be built in Australia: “It’s the equivalent of your 101 Collins Street turned on its side and put on the ground.” He says it is tailored space for an organisation looking to achieve change in the workplace, with the space costing no more than in the CBD. “It’s a whole different approach, a whole different process. It’s no longer ‘give me a couple of thousand square metres of office space and charge me $300 a square metre’. This is about, ‘how do I achieve the change that CEOs and CFOs want to achieve?’.”
NAB has balconies and outdoor spaces for employees, so they can vary their surroundings and microclimate and even meet and work in fresh air. Dowzer says: “In terms of the NAB, you can’t provide the perfect environment for everybody, but it is at such a scale that you can provide as many different spaces for people to be able to go into. The idea is to give variety rather than one condition. The real issue for us in terms of these buildings is about increasing people’s personal comfort, and then ultimately there is a productivity increase.”
The bank has its own version of a winter garden, although Dowzer says the term is grossly overused. This model is “a glass louvred area with complete natural ventilation”. Also in the Docklands, at 700 Collins Street, the offices of the Bureau of Meteor-ology and Medibank, a three story atrium masquerading as a winter garden, provide a breakout space.
Dowzer says the trend towards winter gardens in buildings is a reaction to the dislike of working in the “hermetically sealed boxes” created in the 1980s and 1990s.
With its large floor areas, the NAB has 85Ã87 per cent efficiency of useable space, compared with about 80 per cent achieved in the CBD. Freshwater Place at Southbank in Melbourne, developed by Australand, will be finished later this year and has a similar efficiency ratio and a four-and-a-half star energy rating. It has attracted Pricewater-houseCoopers as its anchor client.
BHP has taken a similar approach in its luxurious and well-appointed 22,400 square metres of global headquarters spread over 13 levels at the Queen Victoria development in the Melbourne CBD. The environment was designed to maximise natural light and views for all staff. Most of the building is open plan with breakout areas, featuring plasma information screens for meetings.
The northern facade of the building incorporates sunshades and light scoops. The shades cut direct heat from the sun in the summer while directing solar radiation, reducing the energy needed for cooling. Inside the building, the shades become light scoops, reflecting the north light onto the floors. The smart lighting system automatically senses when it can dim the lights around the building’s perimeter, while motion sensors turn lights off when nobody is around. The efficient and smart air-conditioning systems can filter in fresh air.
At the Bendigo, the aim is for good air quality and natural light, as well having a broad outlook. Dowzer says: “What this is all building towards is that the happier employees are, the more productivity they put out. And productivity outweighs a lot of property price decisions.