Office deep secrets exposed

By ANNE GIBSON

Hamish Boyd admits his award-winning ASB Bank building in Albany is "a tough box on the outside".

But the $19.6 million building also creates its own harmony and peace; a respectful place where games are played alongside people working.

Boyd, the director of Auckland architectural practice Jasmax, turned 44 the day he accepted an international award in Washington for the building.

It won the "good design is good business" category in the Business Week/Architectural Records Award, supported by the American Institute of Architects.

The award recognises the impact of building design on improving business performance.

The space-capsule shaped building for 371 people, beside the Albany expressway, was named C:Drive in a staff contest - a reference to the role of the structure as being like the crucial main storage disk of a computer system, holding key programs and operating system.

C:Drive, built by Mainzeal Construction at 33 Corinthian Drive, is as large as Eden Park's oval. It has 300km of data cables and is the most highly praised new structure in New Zealand.

The building is entered in the New Zealand Institute of Architects local awards, announced next week..

Such attention is creating something of a dilemma for the bank, which is highly sensitive about exactly what takes place inside.

Jasmax won a design competition against three other firms to secure the job.

"ASB Bank chief manager group property, Derek Shortt, was adamant that the building should be unique and that we go to Australia to look at what was new in design," Boyd says.

The team were inspired by Campus MLC, the alteration of a North Sydney office building that was the city's largest high-rise when it was built in 1957.

Last June, architect James Grose, of Australian firm Bligh Voller Nield, accepted an award from the New South Wales chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects for this internationally acclaimed design, which created new workspace and rejuvenated existing areas in the heritage building.

With this for inspiration, a three-strong Jasmax design team - Boyd, practice director Roy Blok and interior designer Nadine Lee-Johnson - sat down two years ago with the innovative bank staff.

A risk analysis by engineering consultancy Beca Carter had already identified Albany as a desirable and safe area, and staff who initially had doubts about the location ended up grateful for the choice, Boyd says.

If Albany's new buildings have an architectural theme, it is a perplexing Spanish fort style. The Massey campus and a nearby motel sport a Mexican hacienda theme that bears little relationship to surrounding elements.

Jasmax - whose work includes national award-winners such as Te Papa, Dr Robin Congreve's Belmont house and Boyd's Ford headquarters at Manukau - was having none of the fake Mexican/Spanish theme.

Instead, Boyd wanted to bring simplicity, courage, opacity and reality to the building's forms.

If a wall was a precast concrete slab, why hide it behind plaster and gib? If cables had to run above heads, why encase them in fake hung ceilings?

If banks of flashing computers had to be stacked on top of each other in the middle of a room, why not enclose them in hush glass and elevate their physical status to an installation, to art?

If security was an issue, why not draw visitors into the middle of the building before challenging them at reception?

Visitors go through a series of glass sliding panels, then into a dramatic neon-lit concrete vault, then across the span of a suspended bridge, over the top of an indoor netball court and above jousting table tennis players.

Through this experience, a visitor can look through the entire structure since the internal workings are transparent.

Visitors are stopped from entering secure areas by a Jasmax-designed sculpture, Reed Pond, a series of tall, uninviting metal reinforcing rods rammed into stones and cast into a concrete "pond".

The overall result is that what remains hidden and is thought of as ghastly in any other office here becomes visible, lauded and diaphanous.

People become like gliding fish within the structure, moving on one level, but apparent on all others.

Those tee-ing off for a round of golf in the "central park" on the middle level can see people at computer terminals on the mezzanine level but also look to the pentanque players beneath the indoor trees nearby.

Those cooking their lunch in the central kitchen and reading newspapers at a bench can look through the Jasmax sculpture to the badminton players.

Timber slats wrapped softly around curving forms create a special projects area where feet and forms can be glimpsed but not what the bodies are doing.

A lecture theatre whose entire back wall is a whiteboard, a secure building that could operate 24 hours a day, a learning centre for training staff, 386 carparks and the flexibility to expand the 8740sq m building by 1800sq m were all part of the brief for the project, which was a joint development between ASB and Neil Group, the developers responsible for Albany's expansion after buying 130ha of land from the Housing Corporation 10 years ago.

What happens to people when form and function are so closely linked; when the only "offices" are common area meeting rooms?

"There is no status or hierarchy to the elements in the spaces," says Boyd.

"Exposing the structures and services is consistent with the transparent, open-plan building.

"It reveals the integrity and technology of the building and allows the flexibility to meet changing needs."

Architects can influence how people behave, Boyd says, "and people will lift their game if they are in the right environment."