New Zealand Commercial Design Trends Series NZ Commercial Design Trends Vol. 34/02C | Page 33

Below:Synergy is a new gateway
building on the CSIRO’s Black
Mountain campus in ACT. Architects
BVN’s design creates two distinct
forms for the two main functional
requirements of the building –
the workspaces and the integral
Physical Containment (PC2)
research laboratories.
While there are a number of obstacles that
have to be overcome when a company or other
entity wants to implement organisational change,
one of these may be particularly difficult to resolve
says architect Julian Ashton, principal at BVN
Architecture.
“So often you get a push for organisational
change, yet the building the organisation occupies
won’t provide the mechanism to do that,” he says.
But the opposite could be said for Synergy, a
building BVN designed for CSIRO’s Black Mountain
campus overlooking Canberra.
“During the development of Synergy, CSIRO
went through a transformational organisational
phase that called for greater visibility and trans-
parency, and workplaces that were highly
collaborative,” says Ashton.
The 15,000m 2 Synergy was to house a large
number of people previously working in traditional
office space in satellite buildings. And this meant
bringing together two quite distinct functions –
complex laboratory spaces and workplace areas
– into one building.
“The name Synergy is very apt, as the building
needed to accommodate these disparate elements.
A lot of the conversation and discussion about the
building was around the interplay between the two
– having the junction between them highly visible,
highly engaged and highly interactive.”
On top of that, the 4000m 2 corner site was very
much at the centre of the campus, so Synergy was
to be a gateway building, establishing a public
interface with the campus.
BVN’s resolution of this complex set of demands,
was to create a strikingly different form for each
of the two functional space requirements – an
X-shaped building for workplaces and a box form
for the research laboratories.
The laboratory building is clad in Equitone fibre
cement panels in a red oxide colour, and includes
a 3-storey high glazed section that makes research
activities visible to passers-by.
“It’s quite deliberate that the workspace form is
different to the research space,” says Ashton. “The
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