THE CREATIVE PROCESS
As with many highrise office towers in the capital city built in the seventies, the floor to floor ceiling height was poor, allowing little room for spatial exploration. The large rectangular core of the building incorporated a 2 in 1 escape stairs and banks of lifts, dominating the footprint of the tower.

Spread over a total of five full floors and one half floor, the client’s brief provided for a hierarchical management style with clear requirements to house the various seniority of staff. A total of 100 workstations was fitted into the floors along with board rooms, meeting rooms, receptions and IT rooms.

Our design objective was to create firstly a consistency of space planning that would result in a plan form applicable to each floor. In achieving a common principle for planning each floor, we succeeded in creating aesthetic coherence between all the floors.

This was done in two steps: the first - identify and locate social/public accessed areas immediately around the core, and the second - to remove the false ceiling in those areas and allow the services to be exposed.

Then, typically on all the floors, senior managers would be housed in rooms at the opposite ends of the office, leaving a central zone for open plan offices and for daylight to enter.

In creating more for less, we creatively exploited the core walls on level 10, used an all white approach to the colour scheme to create the international look, and adopted one other wood veneer, used on level 15, as the contrast colour.