Offices are funny, organic creatures. Staff join, create systems, file papers, leave. New staff then inherit systems and papers and objects, unsure of whether these are important or not, then they eventually leave. On and on this goes so that an office has a detritus consisting of years of ideas, plans started and never followed through, outdated paperwork and odd objects without a real purpose but surely too good to throw out. So it was with AGM Publishing, publisher of niche design titles such as Architecture NZ, ProDesign, Landscape Architecture, Houses and Urbis. Twenty years in the same space provided innumerable boxes of decaying papers, unascribed slides from before the switch to digital photography and old magazines stretching back to the 1920s. The space had begun to sag around us, and a move upstairs gave us the opportunity not only to clean out the accumulation of decades past, but also to draw together some of the design contacts we have been built over the years to create an office that reflected the design content of the magazines.

Workstations, from Furniture Lab, have defined areas for each of the teams — sales, administration, the design studio and editorial — and screening devices such as the Algue from Cite and architectural greenery from Ambius separated out areas within those divisions.

Colour was one of the key design intentions that has been drawn throughout the spaces — from the glossy yellow partitions in the desking systems and the bright orange wall at the end of the design studio, to the stools by Simon James in the kitchen, and the art works, supplied by Art Associates. Visitors to the AGM offices will get to experience a moment of design luxury with classic armchairs and coffee tables from Corporate Culture. The spaces in which we work are so intrinsic to how we work, and so surely, with the injections of energetic colour into calm functional spaces, our magazines will be that much more energetic and functional as well. Here’s hoping!

Credits: Architectural firm Catalyst; Flooring InterfaceNZ; Workstations FurnitureLab; Office chairs Formway, Herman Miller; Reception furniture Ray chairs, white Bond table, Carl Hansen CH07 chair and Lisa Vincintorio Array Table from Corporate Culture; Feature hanging divider Vitra Algue from Cite; Kitchen furniture Pedro bar stools from Simon James, Daylight chairs from UFL, Mobile Storage Lundia; Wallcoverings Fabric from Mokum; Feature lighting LZF Lamps I-Club and Pod,  from UFL; Feature wall (reception) Retroblocks; Lighting Thorn; Trunking PSL; Hardware and taps Häfele; On-bench hot and cold water Merquip; Paint Resene; Ceiling Tiles Acoustic tiles from Asona; Directory Board Rocket Signtists; Frosting Rocket Signtists; UV window protection Rocket Signtists; Blinds NZ Window Shades; Kichen cabinets Superior Kitchens; Appliances Fridge from Award Appliances; Plants Ambius; Art Art Associates

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Architect’s notes: The interior design at Telecom Place was a real collaboration of architecture and workplace design skills. Design director Andrew Barclay, from Warren and Mahoney, says: “The design team involved in the primary physical design of the interior architecture included architect Blair Johnston and interior designer Asha Page who generated the concept of coloured glass vertical fins to frame the client touchdown spaces on the arrival floor. The ability for clients and Telecom people to meet and work in easily accessible ‘neutral’ territory was essential to the new and open way in which the company wanted to do business.”

This concept supplements the other much more secure meeting suite and boardroom which is concierge-monitored and completely discreet.

The key to translating the Telecom brand into built reality lay to some extent in the establishment of a natural and tactile material palette. “The stone floor slabs, the timber battened ceilings and the selection of colours all echo the New Zealand character without direct reference to imagery. The idea is to allow for change and interpretation throughout the life of the tenancy,” says Blair Johnston.

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It seems weird. An attractive, north-facing character building in the middle of the city … with derelict rooms and a former nightclub downstairs stuffed with debris.
It’s not hidden down some dank alley, either, but has an entrance on gentrified High Street, and a well-established and popular café-bar on the first floor.

The building’s relationship with the creative industries also goes back a few decades. The club, Cause Celebre, broke new acts there. Bono and Public Enemy partied there. In the 1980s, The Listener had offices, and Pavement was based there until its demise in 2007. Indie record labels Propeller and huh! called it home, as did a chunk of the local film industry.

The current tenants include architecture practices and music studios, and recently, the top floor was taken over by an arts collective. In any other city, it would be considered an asset to the area’s development, a much-loved, multi-use building embodying the kind of hip cultural credentials and sense of place councils and developers give themselves a hernia trying to retroactively create.

Which doesn’t explain why, when The Research Agency first clapped eyes on their new office at 35 High Street, it looked like a squat from the Trainspotting set. “It was a total shambles,” says architect Jose Gutierrez. “The concrete floor was actually breaking apart. It was in a real state.” Not only that, but a fake wall had been erected over the bank of north-facing windows, blocking out the light.

However, the company was still keen. While The Research Agency works with corporate clients, director Andrew Lewis was looking for a space that had soul and reflected the boutique character of the company. After removing the false wall, Gutierrez was left with a decent open space, dotted with the thick supportive columns characteristic of older buildings, and two banks of windows, one to the north, and one east over Freyberg Place.

Having previously worked in London on a series of idiosyncratic spaces within heritage buildings and terraced houses, this was familiar territory for him. A series of spatial analyses established a reception area, workstations for 10 people, and a separate boardroom that would also seat 10. A casual ‘ideas space’ with low seating, and a place the staff could eat lunch and have drinks — something other than your typical office cupboard-sized kitchenette — were also on the board, as well as a back office and substantial storage.

The office’s natural light was now one of its best assets — however, the view, of a tired old mansard roof next door, was not. The Research Agency logo is an empty billboard framework, the idea being that the agency provides the content “behind the billboard”. Gutierrez extrapolated this concept to the interior design of the reception area, now designated the “first impression” space: “I wanted to let light in but screen the view. The company filters information, so in a way I used the architecture to explain what they do,” he says.

The raw steel frame he designed will rust over time, while the shadows and patches of light it casts constantly change. “You can imagine an empty billboard in the American desert with cars whizzing past — those were the connotations I used,” says Gutierrez, who replaced the crumbling floor with a FactioStone carpet of glossy black pebbles bonded with resin, giving it the look of a highway slick with rain. It also adds an unusual texture and warmth to the space, so much so that the staff sometimes walks around with bare feet.

The boardroom, where the agency presents its work to clients, was “totally pimped out,” says Gutierrez. The stark black-white colour scheme extended to black ceiling, the glossy surface of which reflects light around the room. “The consensus is that ceilings should never be black, but for me it had to be,” he says. “It makes the space what it is.” A row of Goldie-style portraits of prominent city fathers floats over hanging fabric on one wall. Logan Campbell presides, wielding a retractable four-colour Biro: to play on the idea of Victorian stuffiness, they were PhotoShopped to contain modern ephemera like iPods and tattoos. Similarly, the chairs reference old boardroom style, but are of modern design.

In the main work area, ceiling panels were crucial to the acoustics of the newly open-plan space, and also hide electrical conduits. Gutierrez designed the desks with a linoleum surface that acts as one big mouse pad, and joinery that makes them appear to float. The bespoke “beam of light” above ties the space together visually. His other signature touches include using filing cupboards and the bar island as sculptural elements that integrate extensive storage space. In the casual lounge area, a whole wall has been covered in whiteboard material for easy note-taking, which now adds a personal, dynamic element, while the kitsch lightbulbs from Dark arranged randomly above it break up the otherwise strict order of the plan. Elsewhere, small details, like the metallic finish inside the casement windows, add to the newly high-spec feel of the previously neglected space.

Selected Credits:

Architect Jose Gutierrez
Client The Research Agency
Project Manager Jose Gutierrez
Fit-out contractor Tulp & Walker
Paint Resene
Flooring Spec-Tec International Coatings
Lighting Aesthetics Lighting
Ocasional furniture Robyn Skeates Office Interiors
Textiles Mokum

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‘Art is never finished, only abandoned’, goes the pithy (yet slightly cynical) one liner. Would that the line would relate equally as aptly to architects and their own homes, or perhaps offices — places of constant tinkering and invention; laboratories of architectural ideas. Jasmax’s new-ish Parnell office might well be a laboratory of architectural ideas; the multitude of staff hunkered down in what really is a jolly big open-plan studio certainly give the impression of minds at work.

New Zealand’s biggest architecture firm last year swapped the slightly more bohemian aspect of Newton for leafy Parnell. The shift wasn’t so much about image though, but the construction and design of one’s own offices does present opportunities for reflection on how one works and how one wishes to be perceived. In simple, commercial terms, the lease was up and the burning question was ‘stay or go?’

Jasmax director Tim Hooson says there were a number of motivating factors towards a move, despite strong emotional connections to Upper Queen St. For a man who has spent a fair amount of his professional life analyzing and advising on how to work best, it must have been interesting to turn the lens onto his own firm. Hooson, and project architect for the new building work, Chris Jack, mention that the motivating factor of a soon-to-expire lease also coincided with a burst of research the firm had then recently completed. Jasmax, they say, was interested in understanding how it might better unlock creative potential. Whether that was possible in its current premises was the question.

“Upper Queen St was fundamentally two buildings that were amalgamated into one with a whole new level put on top,” says Hooson. “At the time, Jasmax felt that it wasn’t going to be bigger than one level, and so the structure was purpose-designed with that in mind. But by the time they’d moved in they were on two levels, within 10 years we were over four levels.”

Resources were spent investigating what could be done to increase the potential of the existing building, but “it was impossible to get around the single biggest problem — the building had been conceived as a series of four levels, each level broken into two parts.

“As a consequence we’d ended up fragmented, with great individual team synergies in each space, but with limited inter-team working and knowledge-sharing. We did a range of schemes with the existing building, looking at how we could enhance it, and each time we tried to financially and commercially get those off the ground each one of them tripped over, mainly because the building that we were designing wasn’t suiting the market that it was geographically located in … 1400m2 floor plates went against the trend, and the building owner was struggling with that,” explains Hooson.

Eighteen months out from lease expiry, Jasmax checked the market and drew a blank.  Fourteen months from the lease termination, it became a case of “move quickly or stay put and make do”. An 18 month extension to the lease was negotiated, and the search began in earnest.

Chris Jack, not the All Black, but the architect, says the Parnell building they eventually discovered was previously an agricultural research company. When it started life in the 60s it was a Briscoes warehouse and distribution centre. That original structure was designed for storage — “a big multi-directional flat-slab structure with concrete columns through the lower levels”.

The problem was that it wasn’t big enough, but there was, he says, real potential out the back, where roughly a quarter of the site was covered with “ad hoc structures and machinery”, room for an extra 1000m2 of floorspace, which would make things work. It was also an opportunity to do something interesting in the field of adaptive re-use architecture.

Things moved quickly. The motivated building owner had a good relationship with construction company Naylor Love, bringing them into the mix and asking them to do some initial cost estimates. Within three weeks a basic structure had been sketched up, and the firm had entered into a GMP (Guaranteed Maximum Price) arrangement, a tripartite agreement . That relationship would prove a boon when it came to the task of environmentally ‘up-specing’ the building and implementing the interior design elements.

“The tripartite agreement was initially based on some hand sketches, some notes, and no real design as such,” says Hooson. There was however, plenty of flexibility.

“The real high points for me tie into the sustainability outcomes … the base agreement was set around some very ordinary market understanding — basic air conditioning to a certain degree of performance, for example.

“When we were able to step into it, we were actually able to shift a lot of the parameters within the budgets, especially with the other parties that were around us … We got a number of environmental measures in there that we had alluded to beforehand, but hadn’t secured in the original agreement.”

Jack says the base building elements are very much part of the internal aesthetic. “The mechanical and electrical services were fundamental to the building’s success. All the services were meant to be exposed, but the reality is when you expose services you’ve got to work them hard to make them look half decent, and make them do what they’re meant to do.”

So, at the end of the secondary design process, the architects had introduced a number of environmental measures by working closely with the constructors and the mechanical service engineers and off-setting costs in different areas — “doing these adds and deducts to keep the overall picture the same”.

Jerome Partington, sustainability manager at Jasmax, recently delivered a case study on the firm’s new office at the New Zealand Sustainable Building Conference. He says there were four key principles that helped guide decision making: do more with less energy and fewer resources; minimise waste and pollution and avoid the use of toxic materials; work to enhance and support natural systems; and educate ourselves, our community and partners to deliver a sustainable future.

“The design process was driven by a range of factors including; identified company requirements, Jasmax workplace design and green building experience, a sustainable vision of a new office, using the Green Star tool as guide and check, budgets and rent levels, and the aspirational relationship between Jasmax as the tenant, the landlord and contractor.”

Jasmax, he says, designs green buildings: “As a company that leads in this area it was important to demonstrate the best practice possible, to meet our own needs, those of potential clients and set a public benchmark.”

For two reasons, he continues, the office is not Green Star rated. The NZGBC Office Tool is intended as a whole building rating tool and Jasmax was only refurbishing 70 per cent of the building. Secondly, the firm was focusing on where it could achieve best outcomes. Rather than spreading efforts too thinly, or simply collecting credits.

“The evidence from the finished building points to a high quality, well performing workspace. The office demonstrates that good sustainable outcomes are achievable with a collaborative project partnership approach, by setting clear goals and allowing time to explore design options, and using tools as checklists.

“In the context of an existing building it was an opportunity to demonstrate how excellent practise and treating constraints as opportunities can encourage ‘thinking outside the box’ and better design solutions.”

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Casual meeting space under the watchful gaze of Yvonne Todd's 'The New Helen Keller'.

Advertising agencies have had a number of heydays – the 50s, the 80s (up to ’87, of course), perhaps the late 90s and early 00s (up to ’09, perhaps). Perhaps one way to survey the relative success of an agency during such periods would be to rate respective interiors for frivolous over expenditure and hyperbolic flourishes. But times change. In recessionary moments ostentation can be bitter pill to swallow for clients; a sweeter pill is that of subtlety with a dash of cleverness.

Readers may recall that last year (ProDesign 100) we featured another advertising agency designed by RTA Studio: .99. That fit-out, in Auckland’s Grey Lynn, was an exercise in subtle tones, semi-industrial materials, laser-cut cardboard and barcode-decorated glass – all design techniques to better express that agency’s retail animus. .99 moved out of Colenso BBDO’s College Hill home because, despite the downturn, it had outgrown its allocated space (a point reinforced on p.62 of this issue by .99 CEO Neil Livingstone). Filling the gap in the space vacated is another agency under the Clemenger Group banner – AIM Proximity.
At this site, RTA Studio orchestrated the reshuffle, and according to Clemenger boss Jim Moser also managed to come in on time and under budget. Music to every client's ears, no doubt. Layout wise, AIM Proximity took level one, with Colenso BBDO remaining on level two. RTA’s Ben Hayes says one of the greatest issues was how to counter some of the 1980s building’s inherent inefficiencies and how to shape the building so no greater emphasis was applied to either firm in the various shared spaces.

The design solutions revolved, mostly, around reworking the reception, improving the organisation of the upper levels, finding extra floorspace, and providing adequate meeting rooms and informal meeting spaces. The reception is one of the most important shared spaces, and overall this ground level space was kept neutral, although thanks to a rather unavoidable ‘treehouse’ hanging from the ceiling – a fairly unusual artwork, it has to be said – it’s not exactly a space you’d call uninteresting. The neutral palette also allows the rest Colenso’s New Zealand art collection to impart the colour; these examples of art take precendence over either agency’s work.

Reception and treehouse artwork: 'Dreams' by Richard Maloy.

Reception.

Hayes says the reception desk, which was moved from a cubby hole on the left to a more accessible position on the right, was designed like a jewellery table. In this case, rather than glittering jewellery there is a different kind of booty on display: awards, and plenty of them, statuettes, gongs and other hard-earned baubles of success. Also at ground level is a new meeting room, tucked behind the curve of a new wall that is an effective linking device to the reception’s curving stairway. Moser jokingly mentions that the meeting room is a handy space for ushering either firm’s respective clients past each other, when perhaps it would be in everyone’s best interests for them not to collide.

The reception's 'duck in' meeting room.

Meeting rooms in easily accessible positions such as this are also handy for the ‘duck in’ meeting. This downstairs meeting room has a rather splendid collection of Eames Soft pad chairs, which for obvious reasons were retained during the reshuffle. Any doubters of the prudence of purchasing licensed originals might care to inspect the brilliant patina of these chairs’ upholstery.

Part of RTA Studio’s success in many of its interior projects has to do with the application of unexpected materials and the contrasts of contemporary with historical, and there are certainly examples here. On the level one landing comfortable wingback chairs surrounded by long drapes on circular runners provide a dramatic setting for a casual meeting space. The drapes change the acoustic value and provide various modicums of privacy. A laser-cut chandelier, designed by the architects, an example of a traditional form in a modern guise, and continues that firm’s experiments with precision cutting.
Another device in this area is a series of circular mirrors – a subtle reference to AIM’s logo. This circular device is also incorporated on the corridor wall to the bar and cafe. On the opposite wall is an application of painted wallpaper, with the raised motif providing a subtle, contrasting texture.

This is a disciplined revamp – flexible work stations, for instance, allow numbers to swell on a project basis, and the allocation of space for additional meeting areas is smart – but it is also a revamp with a certain amount of elegance, achieved by lateral thinking and blending new techniques with the more traditional.

– Michael Barrett

Client Colenso BBDO / Aim Proximity
Architect RTA Studio
Project manager RTA Studio
Fit-out contractor CityBuild Construction
Services consultant 22 Degrees; Harmak; i&L
Architectural hardware IR Hardware
Paint and wallpaper Resene; Pacific Wall Coverings
Carpet and vinyl flooring Mannington; Irvine International
Vinyl flooring 2tec2; Advance Flooring
Chandelier lighting Main Reactor
Furniture Vidak
Soft furniture Homage
Fabrics and curtains LaHood
Signage Sharp Signs

Level 1 plan.

Casual meeting space.

Informal meeting space with wingback chairs and drapes.

Mirror detail.

Level 1 — meeting rooms line the left hand side of the building.

Meeting room.

Corridor – the dots refer to Aim Proximity's branding.

Cafe and bar.

Wall detail — painted wallpaper provides this textured effect.

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Unexpectedly, but quite appropriately, rows of tea plants line the foreground of the Bell Tea & Coffee Company head office in East Tamaki, Auckland.

The day the tea ran out, Reporoa, October, 1993 – I’d decided to spend the day reading a novel on a sun-drenched couch while drinking cups of milky, sugary tea. From memory, the novelist was Iain Banks and the tea was Bell Original (this was, after all, the provinces, and it was well before any of these Jhoti-come-lately Sri Lankan teas gained any traction in the market). I don’t recall much, if anything, about the couch. The kettle was doing that thing where the pitch of the bubbling deepens for about three seconds before it flicks off. I swung open the fridge door and spied not a skerrick of milk. Desperately I checked the pantry for some UHT but my fears were confirmed – we were absolutely Mother Hubbard.
I stared at the tea bag steeping in the cup, the harsh tannins insinuating themselves into the brew. Would I be able to handle their astringency without the help of the masking milk proteins? I sighed, dumped in a teaspoon of sugar and adjourned to the couch.

In retrospect, I can’t think of another time when such a minor incident has had such a positive effect on my life. Six milkless cups of tea later I was changed forever. My appreciation for the subtleties of tea began that day 16 years ago and has been evolving ever since. Where once I ordered “milk and two,” now it’s “just black, thanks.” Where once I was embarrassed by my lack of sophistication, now I feel qualified to hold court on the origin of my tea, the structure, the tannins – unspoiled as it is by the bourgeois affectations of milk and sugar. It remains unclear whether ProDesign’s editor knew of my fondness for tea when he assigned me the story about Wingate & Farquhar’s design of the Bell Tea & Coffee facilities out at Highgate, near East Tamaki.

Office exterior; warehouse at right.

'Kink' in streetside facade and metal cladding of office exterior.

The morning I arranged to meet architect David Wingate at Bell, there was such a ferocious deluge that I half expect to see animals filing two by two down the road. It’s grey and gusty, so it’s not the best day to appreciate a semi-industrial area – but it sure is a great day for drinking tea. Once we’re inside, David Wingate explains that the building’s one-level design arose for both philosophical and practical reasons.
“The company philosophy is a flat management structure where everyone is treated equally. Having everyone working on one, open-plan level helps to reinforce that and encourage workers to interact. We also saved money and space by not needing a stairwell or an elevator,” he says.

Bell Tea & Coffee: layout plan.

Tea– and coffee-referencing hues are found throughout the building. The yellow front desk is a gesture to the company’s corporate colours.

Reception detail.

Wingate & Farquhar delivered an office design strategy that shows an uncanny knowledge of how so-called ‘flat management structures’ work. Often the upper management will adopt a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ attitude and exempt themselves from the open plan. Wingate’s design ensured any who might be of that persuasion would think twice about that.

“We deliberately made sure the open-plan workers had the best views and those who were in offices didn’t. If you wanted to work undisturbed, that’s fine, but you wouldn’t get the benefit of the views and natural sunlight. But then if you’re working so hard, you shouldn’t be staring out the window in the first place should you?” he says with a smile.

As a result, only those who really need an office have one. The old ‘corner office with a view,’ the very emblem of hierarchy and elitism, is nowhere to be seen.
The detailing on the workstations uses materials from the adjacent warehouse, which represent Bell’s core business, tea and coffee. The noticeboards are made from coffee sacks, as are many of the communal light shades. I mean it as a definite compliment when I say that it’s the type of office that workers feel they can leave the newspaper on the table. It feels lived in – which is a great quality for a building that’s only been occupied for 9 months.

The building reminds workers that Bell’s goal is to create the best tea and coffee they possibly can, while always remembering where the company came from. The boardroom is fairly simple by modern standards, while still containing all the multimedia equipment necessary. What is notable though is the sense of history in the room. Next to the multimedia equipment sits ancient Bell tea tins, photos of all the significant Bell figures since 1898 and old ledgers filled with immaculate penmanship.

To further link the corporate and manufacturing sides of the company, the boardroom also has a narrow internal window that looks into the tea and coffee tasting rooms. Wingate is rightfully proud of the tasting rooms and he tells me the tea tasting room is widely considered to be the foremost example in Australasia. This is largely due to a glass roof panel above the bench, which catches light from the reflective cladding above. While it wasn’t evident on the rainy day I visited, tea taster Matt Greenwood says viewing the colour of the tea under good natural light is vastly superior to artificial.

Tea and coffee tasting laboratories are now major hubs of the office. The highly visible spaces are adjacent the café. Vision strips in meeting rooms provide glimpses into these labs.

The ‘Centre of Gravity’ café, above. Gravity Coffee is one of Bell’s brands. The furniture pieces were custom-made to represent a geometric map of New Zealand (a built-in fishbowl indicates Lake Taupo). The pendant lights are covered with coffee-sack cloth, and many other references to the coffee and tea trade abound throughout.

Wingate has designed the north-facing side of the building differently than others in the area. Instead of installing louvres to block out the sun, he has gone for narrower windows in the work areas and a large floor-to-ceiling window in the communal area, where some heat gain is acceptable. All this allows views out to the tea bushes that separate the building from the road.

Beside the communal area, the café has two tables in the shape of the North and South Islands (even an internal fish bowl for Lake Taupo) and a much smaller one in the shape of Australia. It’s an informal space and workers can even write company business on the chalkboard walls.

The internal ‘street’ that visitors arrive into separates the warehouse and the branded corporate area. The reception area has artfully arranged stacks of all Bell’s products behind it and a warm ‘hello’ written on the green counter. Iconic photos of the Bell-sponsored Olympian Mark Todd sit just off to the side.

David Wingate sums up his design philosophy for the building. “I want the company to be able to grow into the building. It’s a canvas and as they change and celebrate more and more milestones it will come to reflect their developing identity.”

The building's internal 'street'.

Credit information:

Client Bell Tea and Coffee Company
Architect Wingate+Farquhar
Main contractor Aspec Construction
Paint Resene
Flooring Irvine International (Carpet Tile); Jacobsens (Vinyl); James Halstead Flooring (Marmoleum)
Lighting Eunice Taylor (Table Lamps)
Workstation desks, chairs, cabinetry Workstations from Eclectic Furniture; task chairs from Cite; storage from Europlan
Boardroom tables, chairs Boardroom table from Corporate Culture; boardroom chairs from Kada; meeting chairs from Titan Furniture
Waiting furniture Ottoman from Finewood
Other furniture Sharp & Page; Montage Interiors
Cushions Ingrid Anderson Textiles; Window Design Centre
Signage Sign Craftsmen
Display fittings Pizazz
Specialist wall linings Shears & Mac4
Feature wall Piper Traders

Waiting area with coffee sack decorative panel.

Waiting area.

Detail from tasting labs.

Viewing panel in boardroom through to tasting labs.

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Jasmax were responsible for both the base building and the interiors at the recently completed NZI Centre. ProDesign spoke with two lead architects about the motivations for the 5 green star-rated building.

Interview: Michael Barrett. Photography: Simon Devitt. From ProDesign, issue 104 (with additional images).

The NZI Centre's atrium cafe with meeting room suspended above the void.

So, what were your respective roles on the project?

Nick Moyes: I’m the base building architect. Tim’s team was doing the interiors. We had defined roles for the first half of the project, but about halfway through everything tended to blur. During the process I had a foot in both camps, which was useful for Jasmax. We knew this was a co-ordinated building and it was useful to have someone that was going to both sets of meetings to just make sure that there weren’t any holes.
Tim Hoosen: In the latter stages, Nick took on a kind of directorship role for the overall project. My role remained very much with an IAG focus and, in particular, with the IAG executive. In the initial stages of a project like this, because there are two client bases [developer and tenant], the key thing is to structure the project so that the two start to align. Interestingly enough, I think, in the market to date the terminology of integrated design has got confused with integrated delivery. In other words, that you happen to build the interior works at the same time as the base building is being undertaken. That’s actually just a delivery process not necessarily a design process. If you look at this building, and at Sovereign [House], what’s different is that they are expressions of truly integrated design. The base building is developed with the knowledge that the interior is going to try
and handle certain issues in certain ways.

Vertical ‘gardens’ run through the atrium and vines are planted across the bridges that link the main floor plates to the adajacent ‘islands’.

It must be a much better way to work, one would think, in terms of getting a better result.
TH: It’s satisfying.
NM: Much more satisfying. Tim [earlier] talked about the meeting rooms and in a funny way they’re relatively minor when you look at some of the key points that the interiors team did bring to it. The atrium stair was a key element in terms of the communication between everyone in the building. The glass lift back was a tenant-driven element from Tim’s interiors team. That was based around the activation of the atrium with the vertical circulation of the stair on one side, lift on the other. The common spaces at ground level are obviously an important feature…
TH: Behind every one of the features here you could say, oh, that’s a design opportunity waiting for someone to come up with something clever. But every feature was driven from a business objective. IAG were very articulate about its objectives, very engaged with obtaining a centralised common space that everybody can participate in. They started to realise that it wasn’t just a café – that it could actually be a vertical space, an atrium space, and therefore they wanted it to be alive and active. That perspective brings design opportunities, like, how are we going to treat a large object like a lift shaft?
I think the best example of the whole lot is probably the roof terrace.

Roof terrace.

Approximately 450m2 of sedums (succulent planting) was installed on the roof terrace alongside 150m2 of hard landscaped entertainment areas. The sedums were planted in 90mm of pumice-based soil on a 35mm drainage cell.

I was at a nearby office the other day. Workers there love looking down on the terrace. I think they mostly like watching people doing yoga out there in the morning…
TH: As soon as the terrace got the go ahead, it was the perfect opportunity for a green roof. We wouldn’t have had a green roof had that roof not been activated. As soon as the roof was activated it all fitted together.
NM: We wouldn’t have had the green roof unless the opportunity had been identified. We wouldn’t have had that opportunity identified if it hadn’t been an integrated design. If we had come as a tenant group to the base building team and said, say we need some outdoor space, then that would have been difficult because we’re occupying the whole footprint of the site. They’d have said, well, what about the roof? If it hadn’t been an integrated design I think it would have stopped there.
Too late in the day?
TH: Yes that’s right.
NM: Or too hard. There are a million reasons not to do it; it’s just finding the way through really, isn’t it?
TH: I think about the parallels between this work place and others – and Jasmax has been fortuitous in being able to work on a lot of major workspaces around the place – and the unique deliverables that come out of each project. It’s been pointed out that in architectural form terms that this building sits as a bookend to Vodafone down the other end of the street, and in some ways, in an urban sense, it does some of that. Both buildings address curved linear sites and there are planning requirements and everything else. I think they’re a similar scale in height, in particular, and they’ve got some obvious over-riding decisions that sit within them around the workplace – like lots of daylight so therefore that means lots of glass.
But it’s quite different otherwise?
TH: The way the glass has been treated here is quite different from glass down there. Vodafone is all about transparency and being able to see the individual, whereas here it is much more about the collective.
Are there a number of cultural differences from company to company?
TH: There is. It would be very useful, I think, very intriguing to have an article that articulated the fact that it’s not about trends, but about the insights we develop around innovative workplace design. I think it’s very much around this point of understanding the values and propositions of an organisation and understanding the medium and long-term objectives. If the design team responds to them, they automatically produce unique solutions. Although yes, of course, there will be some common threads, you develop a particular solution for each client you work with.
Are there commonalities even though things are so different with respect to the form of each building?
NM: We’ve become a lot more sophisticated in the way that we understand each client. The clients themselves are more sophisticated in terms of knowing what they want and what’s going to work for them, so therefore our mechanisms for extracting a solution that’s going to work for them has to become a lot more sophisticated as well.
TH: I think the commonalities tend to be in the area of operational pragmatics, for example, the desire to achieve increased daylight or the desire to increase comfort levels or the desire to get good acoustic responses and things like that. Anybody that’s looking for a current and hopefully future-looking workplace will be seeking those things. They’ll be looking at it going: those are the things that we know add to human performance.
The things that are unique are the things that sit specifically within the organisation and apart from the obvious operational side of the business. It sits in the brand and culture values. Does the client want to move those? How do they want to change them? And how do you manage that change? On top of that, what role does the workplace have in actually helping them on that journey – and it might be a journey that they’re looking at over the next 15 years.
What’s the method, then, of defining a company’s needs?
NM: There are two or three tools that Tim’s team have developed. You know, you’re sitting there two or three weeks into the project and the data and insights are coming out. There are individuals in our company that specifically extract that info, and the level of briefing that you get is far beyond what you get as an architect walking round looking at the building saying you need 500 desks and you need 32 meeting rooms and here’s the space, away we go. There’s a psychological, anthropomorphical overlay over the top of it.
TH: You find that the strongest brand values the employees have are with the brand that relates to their customers: NZI, State, Drive Rite, Mike Henry Travel and so on. There was little inter-relationship between the brand groups and that’s quite different, when you think about it. Quite different, for example, to Vodafone, where who you work for is what you sell, or what you deal with.
Does the developer or tenant drive the Green Star push?
NM: I’d say both. Let’s be upfront here. Jasmax are working with IAG first and we were reviewing multiple sites for them. IAG has an extraordinarily strong, an embedded sustainability policy.
People here live and breathe it. In fact, in my experience, when we first engaged with them, they were one of the most extreme corporate organisations I have seen. They were taking huge personal corporate responsibility for sustainability measures and at that stage they’d been measuring their performance for five years. However, there’s no doubt that the developer was very motivated to produce an advanced green building, saw IAG were in the market, and targeted their efforts towards them.
It’s good to see this sort of result here though.
TH: The buildings that IAG are doing in Australia are high-end, five-star buildings. So it was a case of well, we’re doing it over the ditch so let’s get it going in New Zealand. In particular, the CEO, Nick Hawkins, had worked with IAG in Australia, and I think he pretty much gave the project team entitlement to look at IAG’s buildings in Australia. He wanted to be able to walk in here with his head high on the sustainability point. That gave them the authority to really push hard, but I’ll tell you right now, if the development partner had been different, the outcome would have been quite different and not nearly as sustainable.
NM: To our knowledge this is the first contracted five-star building in New Zealand. We had to provide five stars. The deal was off if it wasn’t five and that is a high stick to jump.
Did you work a bit of a buffer
into that?
NM: You have to because you don’t quite know how that design is going to develop.
The first six months on this project we were using the Australian tool. We had a couple of experts within Jasmax that were helping write the New Zealand tool so we knew the direction, we knew the fact that energy was going to be a greater weighting than water, for instance.
TH: It was a timing issue to some degree. There was a tenant demanding five stars. I’ve had a whole range of tenants, BNZ, Westpac all requesting five stars and saying to developers that at an absolute minimum they must deliver four. This one was saying we want to set a new benchmark, we want you to deliver a five-star building and we want to contract you to deliver it – and that was before anybody could actually say what a five-star building was.
NM: It was bloody hard, but it was the best thing that could have happened. Because the tool wasn’t finished the design of this building is holistically green. It’s not box-ticking green. We had no idea what all the boxes were going to be, but we thought that if we fundamentally set up the whole thing up as a sustainable building then we couldn’t help but tick the boxes. The developer drove that. They build to own, so this is still going to be theirs in 20 years time. They don’t cut corners. They make sensible decisions. It was about designing a building to stand the test of time.
It’s interesting that it was a calculated punt. That circumstances meant you were designing at that stage when the tool wasn’t ready.
NM: If you go through the exercise of just trying to tick boxes it’s kind of pointless. It’s not what it should be about.
TH: You’re right that there was a level of circumstance that led to that direction. I would counter that a little bit by saying that I believe, knowing the developers well, that they would still have tended to take a holistic approach. Circumstance led them to a point where the total package had to be a sound one, simply because yes, we might have sensed that the energy rating was going to be more highly rated than something else or highly weighted I should say, but if you put your whole gamble on that you could have easily found that that wasn’t the case and you could have come unstuck pretty fast.
What about the interior – a five– star fit-out as well?
IAG challenged themselves, they’d said to their development partner you’ve got to develop a five-star building, so how do we behave now that we’re inside it? How are we going to drive our interior architecture? Of course, there was no question; it’s got to meet the same standard as the base building.
Coincidentally, that meant going through another process where the rating tool wasn’t formulated, and again using the Australian tool as a guide.
We had people working on this, working groups helping the Green Building Council develop the tool. IAG, with one or two commercial organisations that were going through a property process, became sponsors for the Green Building Council, helping to establish the tool.
The reason they did this was two-fold. One of them was to demonstrate their commitment to the process. Secondly, they committed to the process of not only helping us fund the establishment of the tool, but to also fund a pilot scheme for it. This interior fit-out is one of the two New Zealand pilot schemes, it’s only one of two projects which have so far been rated on the new interiors rating tool, and at its time it was the first, so IAG was pretty chuffed about that. It was the highest rating project in any New Zealand green built category that had been received. It was only three points shy of 6 stars.
Seems a shame to come within a whisker – or is the three-point gulf bigger than that?
NM: It’s achievable. In a funny way it’s down to time. A lot of it comes down to the level of commissioning and just the level of documentation that you need to support it.
TH: We are speculating here, but if they had probably put off their application, we probably would have assembled more information around some points and we could well have got there. But while in one sense it might be a slightly bittersweet, it is still an outstanding outcome.
I agree, it shouldn’t be disparaged. I think that in the New Zealand market, though, it might have been nice to have a touchstone of six…
TH: It will come. I can tell you a project now that will get there if they measured it.
What’s that?
TH: On an interiors base, I reckon our own office. I seriously reckon that if we went in there it would get there.
Are you going to?
TH: Yes, we probably should. It’s a time and compliance thing. From an interior perspective this project and the BNZ project down in Quay Park
– that was the other pilot scheme – have both set benchmarks. I have a strong suspicion that a lot of interior projects will unfortunately step back into credit-counting thinking rather than holistic thinking, and so as a consequence it wouldn’t surprise me to see those benchmarks remain for some while. I think I’m being slightly cynical, but I think that we will find that behaviour starts to creep back in pretty quickly.

Looking around NZI, what are some of the key sustainable features? The thing that I’m most interested in is the ceiling, the T-Ribs – they’re quite distinctive.
TH: It’s fair to say that the developer had one or two almost signature like initiatives. Medium– and low-rise buildings do not singularly motivate them, but they do a lot of them, and they do them exceptionally well.
They’re very familiar with large floor plan buildings, like Vodafone, for example. They’re the same development group. One signature is over-height floors. Interestingly enough, the opportunity for what you see at the ceiling comes as a result of having an open mind when the base building team started reviewing how to design and deliver a highly efficient air conditioning system. It goes full circle.
Hot air rises, is that the layman’s principle you’d use to describe the technique?
NM: It is. We did a lot of analysis before the building design was set, because one of the key early decisions was how to cool the building. Eight-five per cent of energy use in a commercial building goes into cooling. At Sovereign [House] we used chilled beams. That works quite well in the Auckland environment, but the feedback we were getting was that it actually isn’t the strongest system. A displacement floor system would actually work best in the Auckland environment. If you’ve got a traditional system, where you’re blowing the air down through ducts above ceiling tiles, you’re pushing air out at 13 or 14 degrees so that when it hits desk level it’s at 21 degrees – that’s what the target is. Bringing air up through the floor means we can introduce it 18 degrees – and that four degrees is huge in terms of energy-saving benefits. It means that you can use things like free cooling for about 40% of the year.
TH: The philosophy of the atrium is to return air. The air comes in through the western wall, the far elevation, comes up through the floor and just through displacement it finds its way out to the atrium and then these skylights are acting as our return air. The air is returned, reticulated back through those skylights and then it undergoes that same cycle again, so it’s mixed with outdoor air. What sets all this up is the 450ml raised floors. These also provide massive benefits in terms of how power and data reticulation is fed through, air conditioning, sprinkler, mains – everything is through it.
Once you establish the fundamentals of how it works, then you’ve then got the ability to do night flushes. You can bring air in at ambient outdoor temperature so you can cool the structure down and you can use the concrete mass to radiate back.
NM: The rule of thumb is a degree an inch, an inch an hour. So, if you cool it for three hours overnight, you can cool three inches of concrete you can expect that to radiate back out during the day. The cool radiates out at essentially an inch an hour to cool it down or warm it back up again.
TH: When you’ve got something like this you need to bring the air in much, much slower to reduce draughts. But you bring it in so effectively that it just starts to percolate through and you get very little draft. We’re sitting at the top of a five-storey atrium with front doors that are open, and there are no draughts to speak of. The temperature is very stable, but we’re bringing in much larger volumes of air, which requires larger ducts and so on. Normally in a building all those ducts are inside, so therefore you build a bigger building. In this case the thinking was to put the ducts on the outside of the building. The building stays the same size so therefore you’re not building more than you have to, which is a sustainable measure.
The knock-on effect from a design feature such as that must be quite significant?
NM: Moves like this early on give you more money to spend; because we created a very efficient building for the developer there was greater scope to look at other initiatives. What was nice about this project was that no idea was ever ruled out. First ideas were tested and two or three of the things that we really thought weren’t going to get across the line did. We got to the point where we could prove that they would work – and they stayed.
It must be nice to test ideas like this. Good intellectual property too…
TH: The green roof was one idea that fell into that ‘no idea too silly’ category. We were doing a lot of user engagement at the time. By coincidence we heard that one of the former buildings had north-facing decks. This kept coming up at engagement sessions, so we took it on ourselves to say to IAG’s project team that we keep hearing this; that here there’s a real area that we’re being asked about. Your staff know where the site is, they know how close it is to water, but where is the opportunity to get outside the building.
The IAG project team did the obvious thing, which was to ask how are we going to solve this… There was a little slot of light down one side and we said, well there’s a bit of space down there but it’s not very nice and the only other thing we can think of is the roof.
IAG took that to the developer and asked about a roof terrace? The developer did what Nick was just saying, he never shut that idea down, he turned round and said okay, let’s have a think about it. It slowly grew from there – if you’re going to do that, there’s no point in putting people up onto a ratty old roof. What if we have a green roof with performance characteristics with regards to heat loss and heat gain, and rain water filtering.
All those decisions, all the time, were received and considered and I think that’s quite unique in property development right now. Those ideas weren’t tossed out. They were tested.

Urban design sketch.

The NZI Centre has a ‘dia-grid’ curtain wall system and facade. The entrance cube is an angled metal cube inserted in the building's fabric.

Bird's eye view of atrium seating.

The vines and workfloor planting appear to grow from the floor. The plant roots are housed within the 450mm raised access floor, which gives the appearance of continuous floor-to-floor growth.

Casual meeting area. The 'T floor' units are clearly exposed.

The curved seating elements provide private spaces.

'Stacked' meeting rooms.

The NZI Centre exterior.

Level 3 plan.

Fitout concept plan.

Fitout Level 1 plan.

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Words: Michael Barrett

Later on I felt better about being lost – well, after I visited Wikipedia, and discovered that Trengganu Street is sometimes referred to as “the Piccadilly of Chinese Singapore”. Didn’t feel much better about running late, though. Nothing worse than being late for a meeting, being on the right street, but being unable to find the door you’re looking for.

Meet & greet: Visitors are greeted by Leo Burnett’s brand icons as they enter the office lobby – a portrait of Leo Burnett painted from floor to ceiling and a sculptural Leo Burnett pencil.

The person I was trying to meet at the time was Colin Seah, the creative director at Ministry of Design. I did eventually get to his office; the shophouse doorway was tucked away behind the stalls lining the road. Up the stairs and in, and once I navigated my way past what appeared to be a door with no visible hardware, I met Seah himself. But that was two years ago.

I liked his work then, like it equally as much now, if not more. His hospitality design work at Sho-U and the Royal China (images here) are inspired arrangements of space and colour. Seah is US-trained, and cut his teeth working with the likes of Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and RL Binder.He’s done offices, villas, shops and apartments. Nothing is ever the same. One of his latest creations is an office fit-out for Leo Burnett, a 1280 m2 fit-out for the advertising agency.

Creative ownership: The Red Apple has played an integral part in Leo Burnett’s history and branding. A feature wall displaying the staff’s individualized red apples expresses their artistic sensibilities.

Apple feature wall elevation.

White hanging chairs are a feature of the social areas.

Reception elevation.

Ministry of Design describes the three environments it created at Leo Burnett simply: “Space to Impress, Space to Interact and Space to Create”. Most ad agencies need a space to blow prospective clients out of the water – a place to negotiate from a position of strength, perhaps, or to show off awards and what not. In Leo Burnett’s ‘Space to Impress’, visitors are met with a larger than life graffiti-style portrait of the man himself, a 3m-high mural painted on the floor, walls, windows and ceiling of the main entry foyer. In the words of MOD: "A cool-white counter sculpture anchors the reception area, while embedded multi-media screens exhibiting past work."

Reception with embedded media screens.

A full wall-sized projection canvas and a wheelbarrow worth of trophies dominate the chill out space.

Ministry of Design says  the "Space to Interact’ offers a variety of ways to meet and exchange ideas"

"A wall-sized projection canvas and a wheelbarrow worth of trophies dominate this zone; more formal meeting spaces are characterised by an air of mystery as they sit behind a muted jet black corridor. From this corridor, portholes allow peek-a-boo glimpses into the activity within. In the 'Space to Create', a series of open planned desks unite the office into a single creative organism. The overall energetic vibe is reflected in the design of the customized plywood tables. Colored a variety of shades, the tabletops take on a checkered and playful quality. Hot desks for group meetings and discussions also line the perimeter of this vast open plan. Generous outdoor deck areas provide an alfresco alternative from the sun-dappled interiors. Ministry of Design has also integrated a 15m-long anamorphic art feature that captures the aspirations of Leo Burnett towards every higher creative achievement."

Leo Burnett work room.

The office features open seating for 112 staff, Reception, Lobby, Bar, 4 Meeting Rooms, 4 Meeting Pods, 6 Hotdesks, 1 President Room, Print Production Room, HR & Finance Room, Patio

Hotdesk elevation.

The more formal meeting spaces are characterized by an air of mystery as they sit behind a muted jet black corridor. From this corridor, portholes allow peek-a-boo glimpses into the activity within.

Green on black – portholes offer glimpses into bright green meeting rooms.

Formal meeting room in a retina-burning green.

Porthole view.

Black tunnel elevation.

Black tunnel elevation 2.

Anamorphic art.

Anamorphic Art The creative teams within the agency strive for a 7+ internal rating for their projects: the 7+ anamorphic art painted in the patio reminds all of this benchmark.

A matter of perspective; environmental art with a persuasive function.

A matter of perspective; environmental art with a function.

Layout plan.

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LaboBrain — French designer Mathieu Lehanneur at the Laboratoire.

LaboBrain is a tailor-made all-white studio. Photo © Fabien Thouvenin

Designing new layouts for the Laboratoire, Mathieu Lehanneur has created functional spaces on the borderline between art and science: LaboBrain is a private think-tank.

The LaboBrain is a tailor-made all-white studio for David Edwards, the founder of Laboratoire. It is a gym, a place for working out thought, with all the appropriate tools cerebral athletes need to hone their performances. Projected in brainstorming mode, the user does not have a sit-down work post. He works moving about in front of a concave Velleda screen, a secret alcove that is also a surface where this space age cave-man scrawls ideas and drawings, a sounding board for the creative intellectual.

Buckminster Fuller haunts this alternative space for thought-on-the-move. In homage to his geodesic dome, a half-deflated leather soccer ball offers laid-back rest between two work-outs, while under the floor-level grate, plant-life is busy eating CO2 and pumping up oxygen to bring organic relief to the interior.

Almost classic, the table and chair in the office of David Edwards’ assistant is the right-side lobe of this brain, the rational part for organization and storage. But there is one constraint: not a single stray artefact to catch the eye. A wall of immaculate white cardboard boxes salutes the iMac in manual mode, and will serve for several years of paper archives.

A wall of boxes also figures in the main space, but in sheet metal. Their sides embossed in a wafer pattern call to mind a New York hot dog stand revamped to Italian design codes. Pop-style luxury in a place that pulls together the USA and France.

The user does not have a sit-down work post. He works moving about in front of a concave Velleda screen. Photo © Fabien Thouvenin.

The Velleda screen in front of geodesic dome inspired seat. Photo © Fabien Thouvenin.

Under the floor-level grate, plant-life is busy eating CO2 and pumping up oxygen. Photo © Fabien Thouvenin.