Sus­tain­able at Heart

With Jas­max dir­ector Tim Hoo­son par­ti­cip­at­ing in a spe­cial CoreNet Pecha Kucha next week, now seems like a good time to post this story from ProDesign 107, about the archi­tec­tural firm's move to a new Par­nell base.
Words: Michael Bar­rett. Pho­tos: Simon Devitt.

‘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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