More than the sum of its parts

November 2009 - High-performance buildings are more than mere assemblies of energy-thrifty components – genuine efficiency is only achieved when all parts of the building fabric are integrated seamlessly under one design purview. JOHN POWER went in search of integration perfection and found it at the new Blackmores Campus office and distribution centre in Warriewood, Sydney.

The new $32 million, 14,000-square-metre Blackmores Campus, recently completed for the well-known Blackmores health product, vitamin and supplement firm, is the building equivalent of a healthy body – with all parts working in harmony to create a coherent, balanced whole.
Master planned and designed by Watermark Architecture and Interiors, the 4,500-square metre office component features open plan office spaces and winter gardens, a concierge, flexible conference facility (able to accommodate up to 200 people), staff lounge, a café and staff shop for approximately 220 employees. The architectural firm S2F designed the adjoining production and warehousing component.
A staff ‘wellness centre’ at the core of the building incorporates treatment rooms for massage and naturopathy, a yoga and Pilates area, a gym, changing facilities and a lap pool.
While such amenities are not uncommon in many contemporary workplaces, particularly in progressive European and North American cities, the high degree of operating efficiency of the building is indeed noteworthy. As we will see later in this article, the Blackmores office is ‘air-conditioning free’ for 55 percent of all days, and uses 80 percent less mains water than a conventional building of the same size.
According to Watermark’s managing director, Greg Barnett, it is no coincidence that the Blackmores business, which is focused on health matters, has also driven the healthy design philosophy of the building.
“Our brief for the project was to reflect the values and ethos of the company in the built environment,” Barnett explains. “In understanding the company, it became clear that Blackmores is about much more than producing their products. Blackmores cares about the customer’s health, the environment, their staff’s well-being and their organisation’s effectiveness in an integrated way. They are justifiably proud of their staff retention rates and their regular listing as an employer of choice.
“The design called for the bringing together of different company divisions. Blackmores’ executive chairman Marcus Blackmore indicated that a ‘family’ or togetherness between the groups was crucial. The design also called for the co-location of a number of different components of the Blackmores businesses. This creates a ‘campus’; i.e. the sense of different departments within a larger whole.”
The arrangement of office spaces around a central hub (staff café, staff shop, wellness centre and even toilet facilities) and connected by an internal ‘street’, Barnett says, encourages regular staff interaction and learning, representing another key component of the campus feeling.
The configuration, nature and density of all workspaces are designed to provide a balance between community and privacy.
“Of course, there are private formal meeting areas, but our work has shown that different workplace needs can be best served by a range of different types of spaces,” Bennett says.
“Along the north of both office wings we have designed winter gardens, offering a range of seating types and different materials. These spaces are physically close enough, yet removed from the conventional work desk. They also encourage collaborative work and visually provide a restful atmosphere that in practice we have found even helps to encourage quieter habits in the conventional work areas.”

REDUCED NOISE
According to Watermark’s director – projects, David Bennett, soft furnishings, acoustic panels on workstations and the inclusion of non-parallel surfaces attenuate internal noise. Areas with a higher potential for sound generation, such as the customer services area, have some additional acoustic treatment on the ceiling.
“In addition, we have allowed for future white noise to acoustically ‘mask’ low-level background sounds, but the acoustic privacy in the general office space has been found to be so effective that it has not been required,” Bennett says.
Nevertheless, there are quiet rooms, enclosed meeting rooms, winter garden spaces and a staff lounge/café for those occasions where peace is required.

EFFICIENCY FROM THE GROUND UP
Supreme functionality is most prized if it is delivered efficiently, and multiple active and passive systems have been incorporated into the building to optimise year-round water and energy savings.
“The building’s design has provided an extremely low-energy office environment,” Bennett says. “The [gas-powered] trigeneration system (supplied by Cogent Energy, see description page XX) provides approximately 75 percent of the site’s energy load and, being a low carbon energy source, it provides a great water and energy win for the development.”
The orientation, materials selection and spatial configurations of the building envelope all contribute to efficiency – through optimal airflow and ventilation, for instance, as well as comfortable lighting conditions. Watermark’s competition-winning concept design integrated all these issues from the earliest days of the project. Working with AECOM, the concept design of elements such as the labyrinth, heat stack and lighting solutions were tested and developed.
Lester Partridge, AECOM’s technical director – buildings, and director of applied research and sustainability, describes the ventilation system as ‘mixed mode’.
“This means that it can work in natural ventilation mode or mechanical ventilation mode,” he says.
“When in natural ventilation mode the solar chimney/wind tower integrated into the design of the northern building façades draws air through the building from the southern operable windows. The wind or the sun provide the power to draw the air through. In addition, the heat generated in the space by computers, lights and occupants creates rising air movement, which assists in the removal of vitiated air from the occupied zones.”
In mechanical mode the windows close and a conventional air-conditioning system operates by supplying conditioned air to the occupied space from under the floor. If the ambient temperature is within a certain range, however, the heating or cooling mode is deactivated and 100 percent outdoor air is supplied via the air-conditioning system. This, according to Partridge, is known as ‘free cooling’.
Thanks to this platform, the building can operate in either natural ventilation mode or free cooling/economiser mode more than 55 percent of the time that the building is being used.

POND & LABYRINTH
On those occasions when more active heating and cooling is required, there is a state-of-the-art system that makes use of a number of ingenious, networked devices and structural features.
“The mechanical mode is based on an underfloor air distribution system,” says Partridge. “When required, conditioned air is supplied at between 18 and 21 degrees Celsius from below the floor to condition the occupied space. The underfloor supply air is conditioned via air handling units located in the sub-floor basement plant room. These units have heating and cooling coils in them, which are served from the central trigeneration energy plant room.”
The air intake, Partridge notes, was designed to passively reduce the peak ambient temperature during summer. The concept is based on firstly having a clean treated water body close to the air intake. The micro-climate around the water body is inevitably slightly cooler than the air temperature and the system draws from this zone. Once the outdoor air enters the building, it then travels along an underground corridor to the air handling plant room; there it enters the various air handling units before it is distributed to the occupied zones. The effect of the pond and labyrinth is to pre-cool the air and increase the period of time that the air-conditioning system can operate without cooling.
As David Bennett adds, “The pond not only plays a key role as the ‘lungs’ of the building, but it also draws visitors in through a unique entry experience.”

THE VALUE OF WATER
In addition to the use of ponds for office air pre-cooling, the efficient use of water has been considered at multiple levels. As Partridge itemises, water-related services include reinstatement of a natural creek system, as well as rainwater harvesting (run-off water from the roof). The original design even considered the provision of wetlands.
“All water captured through roof harvesting is treated for use in the building,” he says. “Harvested water is primarily used for toilet flush, cooling tower make-up and irrigation, with a portion of harvested water treated to potable standard for use in the office building. These water saving strategies were designed to achieve water reduction targets of 80 percent of a conventional building.”
The rainwater tank includes a 650-kilolitre storage vessel and a 25-kilolitre day tank. “Provision has also been made within the building for the future installation of a blackwater treatment and sewer mining system,” he explains. “This system, when installed, will serve the cooling towers, toilet flushing and irrigation, freeing up harvested rainwater for more potable uses within the building.”
The blackwater treatment and sewer mining system is currently awaiting approvals and, when commissioned, will have the potential to make the office facility independent of mains water.

SEEING THE LIGHT
Tim Shotbolt, AECOM’s associate director, says he is particularly proud of the effectiveness of the building’s lighting systems.
“There is much more to lighting than the energy consumed per square metre,” he says. “Blackmores’ new office facilities have an optimum orientation to take advantage of natural light. Natural light includes both sunlight and daylight where sunlight is the direct light from the sun and daylight is the more diffuse light from the sky, clouds etc.
“Natural light varies constantly from sunrise through midday to sunset, both in terms of quantity and quality of light. Our biorhythms respond to these natural diurnal and seasonal changes in light. The main office lighting is designed to work with our biorhythms and the changes in the natural light outside.”
Shotbolt says the main office lighting consists predominantly of modules of suspended low-profile linear fluorescent luminaires (light fittings). These Fagerhult Ten° Line luminaires produce upward light that bounces off the ceiling, which helps make the space feel bright and light. The upward component is a cooler bluish white light similar to that from the midday sky and the downward component is a warmer light similar to sunrise and sunset. High-efficiency T5 fluorescent lamps run on TridonicAtco dimmable electronic DSI control gear, which responds to signals from a C-Bus control system.
There are zones adjacent to the north-facing winter gardens and also adjacent to the south-facing windows. These perimeter zones have daylight sensors that are linked to the C-Bus control system, the perimeter zones being controlled separately to the central zone. According to the available sunlight and/or daylight, the office lighting in the perimeter zones will dim automatically to minimise energy consumption.

FINE-TUNING
The building’s ongoing performance will be subject to a range of advanced monitoring, sensor and management tools, as mentioned above.
As AECOM’s Lester Partridge elaborates, “The building has been designed to incorporate a fully integrated building management system. This system is capable of monitoring the building performance and logs the energy consumption throughout the day. Extensive sub-metering allows the building operators to continuously monitor and fine-tune the building performance.”

This article first appeared in the Integrated Services feature, ‘Facility Management’, Oct-Nov 09 issue.
More information
AECOM    www.aecom.com
Blackmores    www.blackmores.com.au
Watermark Architecture & Interiors    www.watermarkarchitecture.com.au

TRIGENERATION: DRAMATIC ENERGY SAVINGS
The Blackmores Campus trigeneration plant, supplied by Cogent Energy, comprises two 386-kilowatt MTU 400 series gas-powered engines connected in parallel to the grid.
According to Nalin Wickramasinghe, Cogent Energy’s manager – business development New South Wales/Queensland, one engine is coupled to a 292-kilowatt Thermax exhaust absorption chiller, while the other engine is coupled to a 461-kilowatt Thermax double effect exhaust and engine jacket chiller.
Plate heat exchangers provide 625 kilowatts of heating capacity for building space, the lap pool and production heating. The absorption chillers and heat exchangers are fully integrated into the building’s heating, chilled and condenser water systems.
The plant is set up to operate in grid, parallel import and island mode, and operates automatically during the peak and shoulder demand periods.
Lester Partridge, from engineering consultancy AECOM, says the system burns clean natural gas in two reciprocating engines to turn an alternator and generate electricity for the site.
“The heat generated by the gas-fired engine is used to heat domestic hot water and in winter to provide hot water for use in the air handling units for space heating,” he says. “In summer the hot water is also used to power an absorption chiller. Absorption chillers operate through a lithium bromide chemical process to convert heat into chilled water.
“Drawing electricity from the conventional coal-powered grid has efficiencies of close to 30 percent. With the trigeneration system the efficiency is in the order of 80 percent and the reduction in carbon emissions is in the order of 50 percent when operating.”

Cogent Energy Pty Ltd, founded in 2006, is an Australian distributed trigeneration energy company specifically targeting solutions for large commercial and industrial building complexes.
Cogent designs, procures, installs, maintains and finances integrated trigeneration plants in large commercial buildings. Cogent also operates under an energy retailer model and holds New South Wales and Victorian electricity retail licences to supply customers consuming more than 160 megawatt hours per year.
On 24 July 2009 Cogent became a fully owned business of Origin Energy Retail, forming part of Origin Solutions.
More information
Cogent Energy    www.cogentenergy.com.au
Origin Energy Retail    www.originenergy.com.au