Warren and Mahoney are one of New Zealand’s leading environmental architectural firms, who have been deeply involved in the new wave of large, green commercial buildings. Tim Rainger caught up with Andrew Barclay to discuss the whole concept of green buildings.
Tim: You guys have developed a peculiar niche in developing large, sustainable, public buildings. Clearly this is a response to a social reality associated with Global Warming and the rise of sustainability issues in the public consciousness. How and why has that happened?
Andrew: We’re on an ironic hinge at the moment because the world is visibly strained to the point where we can for the first time say that our children might be the last generation to really enjoy the lifestyles we have grown to enjoy. You know, it’s a recent prospect. And it’s not because of a war, but because the world may just strike back of its own accord. For every generation until now, it’s always a question of what man might do to itself, and now it’s become more of a question of whether we have a place in the world because of many factors including what we’ve done to the world.”
“The kind of change that we’re now beginning to encounter is the very front end of it, but there’s been a very short time, less than two years, since the major western democracies were denying that climate change is even a reality. People may disagree on this completely but those realities are straining the consciousness of the western world.
Tim: “It’s a big mind shift to accommodate.”
Andrew: “It will be a big mind shift to accommodate the reality that we might not have a future. If you woke up in 1945 in Berlin, you would have every right to think that the world had come to an end. You’d have the evidence all around you that your city and your families and your national structures had been destroyed, it was clear that there was a problem to be resolved. But now we’re living in a time when life’s never been better….. Life in New Zealand and Australia and other western places in the world, but particularly New Zealand and Australia, has actually never been better. Our access to things has never been greater than it is now. And that’s the irony that we’re living with that reality, but at the same time were living with the other reality, that it could all be about to come unstuck; and the psychology of that moment is pretty interesting. People can just ignore it. Some people become depressed by it. Other people will reject it and other people will become fanatical about it. And we’re seeing it with our clients, you know. The environment is absolutely right in the cross hairs of everything we are doing now. Clients that didn’t want to know about it three years ago, are now...well let’s say it’s right at the top of their brief.”
Tim: “Is that a case of Commercial interests predicting what the market is going to do, or is it an emotional response and moral response by business…?”
Andrew: “It’s a commercial reaction to policy makers. Banking is an example, Westpac, BNZ, ANZ, all of those major banks are all looking to the future. Their most valued employees are the Gen-Y people and our new clients will be Gen-Y people. One of the most important things for a large professional service organisation now is recruiting and retaining the best talent. Having a strong ethical position on the environment has now become very, very key to retaining and attracting talent. It’s not quite on its own, but in the commercial world, we’re seeing environmental issues holding hands with very well equipped, very relaxing, very humanistic work environments. So, there are a number of issues that are connected.
People who are bright young things at the age of 27, who have got talent and energy; want to be in an environment which is well located, which is well lit, which is physically very comfortable, where they’ve got good coffee, good libraries, access to crèches, access to gyms, that look and feel exciting and contemporary. And every employer, if you’re an accountant firm, if you’re a law firm, if you’re banking, if you’re any professional services provider actually, and you don’t provide those things you’re probably not going to attract the best talent and you’re not going to retain them. If you’re in a competitive mass market like banking,and you don’t have an expressed environmental position you’re not going to be seen as being a contemporary thinker. So that whole landscape has completely shifted and it’s accelerating.
It was all started in NZ by local government, who in modest kinds of ways started to move towards consideration of our energy consumption and responsible design of buildings. And it’s moved from there to central government. Central government were actually influenced by local government and have now adopted an environmental policy called Govt3 which is a protocol which refers to standards of different types of buildings, which means that every building that is occupied by government services has to be a certain green star rating. You see it in business in general where companies are trying to find some position in the world regarding their environmental stance”
Tim: “I guess there’s also been a change in consumer understanding of what it means to be Green. Whereas probably five or ten years ago it was very fluffy, fuzzy, hairy thing, now it’s not in any way a fluffy, fuzzy thing... it’s a very sleek and a modern beast.”
Andrew “You know, ten years ago when people talked about green buildings they were talking about houses, in New Zealand anyway. There probably were emerging philosophies about how to deal with a large building but they were probably talking about the handmade house, passive solar heating, the turf roof, low impact materials, etcetera…In terms of understanding the New Zealand climate and responding architecturally to that, I think Ian Athfield is a good example of someone who did do that 30 years ago.
Something like 40% of the world’s energy is consumed in buildings. And as more technologically sophisticated countries like Germany, have legislated for more efficient buildings, New Zealand has kind of caught onto that theme, along with Australia. We’re probably behind Australia in terms of how we’re making buildings. But anyway, I think the application of green principals to multi-storey buildings, to community buildings, and to institutional buildings has required different technologies. And, so things like ventilated facades on multi-storey buildings; double skinned facades that are ventilated in the centre, an approach we’re using on the BNZ building in Queen Street here at the moment, which are totally new technologies to us, but have been around for 15 years overseas.
And yes, they are very sleek, clean looking technologies, that is, they’re all glass and steel; there’s no fur on them at all. The work we’ve done on libraries throughout NZ which has been really classic Warren and Mahoney has been the kind of building type which has propelled our thinking in terms of environmental design. It hasn’t resulted in strange looking hobbit like buildings because the kinds of technologies that we’ve been able to afford and use have been things like the building doing its own sun shading, incorporating thermal mass into the buildings, ventilated floor slabs which is a very simple technique of pumping two floor slabs with a gap between, pumping warm air into them in the winter and cool air in the summer so that the weight between the slab maintains thermal equilibrium. There’s been a series of flow on effects in public buildings. By people removing the air conditioning, we’ve been opening doors. By opening all the doors we’re able to actually reconsider the outdoor-indoor connection between the building and its environment. All of those technologies have lead us to actually re evaluate the way the buildings are used and how this impacts issues like security. But they’re related to very simple use of conventional technologies in the first instance.
Tim: “I note strong minimalist style to some of the buildings you guys have made, uncluttered, clean lines. Is that a timing thing where the minimalist design wave has been contemporary and it’s flowed onto building design, or is it an integral part of designing green buildings?”
Andrew: “Warren and Mahoney at its heart is a particular practice that has been essentially modernist. We’ve explored a particular aesthetic starting point which is modernism. A concern that was expressed in its most basic form in the 1920’s is that form follows function, and leans into expression and choice of materials. That clarity has always been important to us. We’ve found that the environmental thing has not meant the NZ landscape for example. The environmental take on modern buildings has not meant putting lots of plants in, and building with earth walls – but it could mean that. It’s a different way of looking at it, and there are some architects that go down that track. It’s just not a track that we’re comfortable with.
The Riccarton Library in Christchurch, for example is a very simple building. The high building design is just predicated on the idea that it has louvers down the west side so you get this lovely quality of light with great ventilation. There is no air conditioning and the temperature is controlled by automatic louvers. Similar devices have been employed on The Westpac Trust Stadium in Waitakere which is the only stadium in NZ anything like that size that’s not air conditioned, and it’s been very, very simple techniques that we’ve used. The only thing that overlays on that is the individual hand that holds the pencil when you’re doing the design
From my own personal point of view I have been concerned about the clarity of what the building is actually doing and saying and I’ve never particularly enjoyed complicated geometries. I admire Frank Gehry’s work enormously but it’s not a style I’d be particularly interested in working in. It’s a starting point at W&M that is not common to all practices, but we haven’t seen any good reason to complicate that starting point when we come to consider environmental design, in fact it serves us really well.
Interestingly, the very early modernists like Mise Vanderow had no environmental concerns at all, they were simply building on a new industrial system of glass and steel and concrete to some degree. In our generation modernism and environmentalism have come head to head and they’re actually rather surprisingly being able to support each other because the technological simplicity of the kind of products that are available now, coupled with the way we’re thinking about building, which is part of the modernist mindset about clarity and systemisation to some level and the need for environmental consideration, the two things become aligned. So you start to think about buildings as machines, because those two things lead you to consider operability, functionality, flexibility. Those things are not heading in different directions they’re actually converging things, whereas decoration in its true sense and environmentalism are essentially at odds.
The strictness of modernism and the efficiency required from an environmental point of view can actually hold hands quite fairly. There are a number of international firms who have mastered it; Richard Rogers stands out, so does Renzo Piano, who have nailed that connection and are essentially pure modernist architects who have probably gone deeper into environmental concerns, have been willing to take risks with it, and still came out with an essentially modernist answer because it’s just the simplest way to build something.”
Tim: “I understand Norman Foster is designing a whole green city in Abu Dhabi”
Andrew: “The scale of what those guys are doing is phenomenal. They’re here next week actually for a meeting on a building Fosters are the designing here, on the West Plaza site.”
Tim: “Do you think the modernist style that’s expressed in your buildings and in general will be enduring and stand the test of time well?
Andrew: “If you look back at the work we’ve done, I would argue that some of those buildings we did in the mid 1950s early 1960s are the best buildings in NZ, and will always be the best buildings in NZ. However, the kinds of ways of expressing that modernist ethic have changed. I think the firm has always understood that different kinds of buildings require different kinds of responses.
“One of the keys to me is to always ask the questions what is this building actually doing? Once you’ve established that, you can then say what does the building need to have to achieve it? If you’ve got that story straight about what the function of the building and the environmental philosophy behind it may be, you can then ask the question what must it have? If there’s something happening with the building that’s not falling into the must-have category then we should delete it.
"It’s a good discipline."
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