New Zealand Commercial Design Trends Series NZ Commercial Design Trends Vol. 33/04C | Page 37

Facing page:A timber batten
ceiling above and matching area
rugs below bring warmth to the
PwC lift and circulation lobby,
which is also enlivened by a café.
Below:Art for organisation’s
sake – visitors to the top-floor
Chapman Tripp offices are quietly
directed towards the reception
by the angles of a sawtooth
dividing art wall that also shields
workspaces and meeting rooms.
brise soleils or other shade options that would
interrupt the graceful lines of the building.
“Our answer was to introduce fritted glass panels
on the long street-side facade, interspersed with
GRC matt panels – the correct proportion of the
two successfully reducing the heat load from the
northern sun.”
The southern side of the centre is partly finished
in this cladding, but not to the rear, where future
adjacent construction will obscure it anyway.
One talented staff member at Warren and
Mahoney wrote some code based on an algorithm
of birds swirling in flight, and this was applied to
the frit pattern in the glass. There’s even a tui shape
hidden in some of the fritted glass panels – so a
visitor to the PwC centre with a child in tow has a
ready distraction for them.
Apart from attractive patterning, the fritted glass
has the practical function of mitigating solar gain
without significantly interrupting workers’ views.
The building is designed to present a defined
base, middle and top – respectively the ground
floor set-back, the four central floors, and the top
floor office space, occupied by law firm Chapman
Tripp.
The centre’s crisp aesthetics are given a human,
warm feel through wooden batten soffits on the
underside of the ground floor overhang, on the
building’s formal entrance canopy and on the ceil-
ing of the open terrace on the second-to-top floor
– spaces taken by the naming tenant PwC.
Elements of the building form are a response to
the environment, too. Being in proximity to The
Avon, a height of nearly a metre was calculated as
the likely rise of water in a one-in-one-hundred-
years flood. For this reason, the entire building is
raised above ground level by one metre.
Other examples include the fact that the tapered
east end of the building presents a respectfully
modest face to the river and Bridge of
Remembrance. Plus the set back top floor delivers
the 45% recession plane required by the city plan
so the street to the north is not overshadowed.
And the building’s raised base was given a head
start thanks to Warren and Mahoney’s response to
Christchurch’s most obvious environmental factor.
search | save | share at