Max in, Max Out

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 café 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 façade. 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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