New Zealand's ASB North Wharf, designed by BVN Donovan Hill in association with Jasmax, has been given an Auckland Architecture Award for Sustainable Architecture.
The award’s jury applauded the design for its bold response to a sustainable imperative and passive technology.
The building features a giant funnel that draws natural air through the workplace as well as innovative solar daylight harvesting technology and sunscreens to help energise a substantial and mobile working community.
James Grose, national director of BVN Donovan Hill, says, “The imperative of all urban renewal programmes is to lay a foundation of excellence in public amenity, robustness of function and contextual, human scaled, diverse and appropriate architecture.
”As the office building gets ever more ubiquitous, if we can make these structures indifferent to fashion, then we have achieved an enormous amount. Large open floor plates with attached service cores mean that as corporate behaviour changes and flexibility is required, a building with an unencumbered floor plate will suit space requirements for a very long time,” he says.
“In coming years the inflexible model of the city skyscraper with its central lift core and restricted floor plate will be demolished and replaced by highly flexible “ground-scraper” buildings that simply require less energy to build, to run, to maintain and will last longer – because they are closer to the ground – sustainable buildings that will not require demolition every 20-30 years,” predicted Grose.
