28 November 2012 -  Aurecon recently moved into its new building, the Aurecon Centre, at 850 Collins Street, Victoria Harbour, Docklands.

Aurecon’s 700 Melbourne based staff will work across five interconnected floors in this ‘smart’, green building which offers innovative, market-leading standards of air quality, energy efficiency and sustainability in a high quality working environment.

The Aurecon Centre was designed by Aurecon’s engineers, in partnership with developers Lend Lease, with the aim of enhancing their colleagues’ well-being and their ability to connect and collaborate.

Aurecon’s team provided base building and fit-out engineering services, including building services and structural, as well as civil, facades, acoustics and fire engineering design services. Lend Lease have already obtained a 5 star award from the Green Building Council of Australia for the base building design and Aurecon is targeting a similar rating for the fit out design.

The fit out design by Geyer aims to bring to life the brand and business objectives – Leading, Vibrant, Global. To ensure an active and vibrant environment on all floors communal spaces have been centralised around the stair with a range of meeting environments. Each floor design was inspired by the culture and architecture of the different regions that Aurecon works within culminating in the global design of the client floor.

Paul Hardy, Aurecon’s CEO, has a base in the Aurecon Centre and also maintains one in the company’s Pretoria, RSA office. He said, “Our team has done a great job in creating vibrant and responsive office space that will be a pleasure both for us and our clients to work in. It meets the growing need of our people for access to smart technology and communal spaces that enable easy collaboration across our specialist areas of expertise, industries and locations.”

Aurecon is implementing a pre and post occupancy staff survey that aims to clearly demonstrate the impact that a comfortable, vibrant and sustainable environment can have on both health and productivity.

Bill Glasgow, Aurecon’s Melbourne Delivery Centre Manager, said, “After the extensive staff consultation which took place on this building, we are delighted to have delivered a very open and inviting workspace for our people and our clients. We anticipate many positive benefits including improved productivity and staff engagement.”

Some of the building’s key features include:

• A fire engineered solution that allowed the installation of an open contiguous interconnecting stair through the height of the tenancy over 5 floors, which would be otherwise not allowed under the deemed to satisfy code obligations. The stair and void lands within the communal and collaboration hubs on all floors reinforcing the ‘One Aurecon’ values and ensuring these areas are active and vibrant.
  
  
• An external terrace that overlooks one of Docklands parklands with outdoor furniture and BBQ for staff enjoyment and Wi Fi enabled as an outdoor working space.
  
  
• A “once-past-the-face” air conditioning air flow that provides outdoor air ventilation at twice the code requirement. Each person has a floor grille located at their desk with which they can control their airflow and local climate.
  
  
• Perimeter opening windows in meeting rooms and the open office area provides natural ventilation.
  
  
• Integrated security access and lift call system where access card also calls lift which predicts destination floor based on fuzzy learning logic from previous travel history.
  
  
• Meeting room booking system with interface screen at the entrance to all meeting rooms.
  
  
• A single cable solution providing integrated user friendly AV to all meeting rooms including video conferencing facilities.
  
  
• Fully automated energy efficient office lighting that includes up-lighting of the ceiling to minimise office space “gloom”.
  
  
• Building façades that reduce energy consumption. The building has grey, double glazed low-e windows that trap heat on the surface and prevent it from radiating into the office and will also help to eliminate glare. This also means an increase in natural light, giving the office an open and bright feel. "
  
  
• Extensive acoustic treatment and isolation throughout for aural privacy and occupant amenity.
  
  
• Water saving techniques include the collection and re use of rain water and fire test water for toilet flushing.
  
  
• Reflective back window blinds to control heat and glare at perimeter full height glass façade.
  
  
• Energy efficient multi zone inverter type tenancy air conditioning to larger meeting rooms.
  
  
• Heat recovery kitchen boiling water units that use chilled water refrigeration heat rejection to warm the sink hot and boiling water supplies.
  
  
• Data centre in row cooling with hot isle cold isle containment for energy efficiency cooling.
  
  
• VoIP telephony
  
• A range of AV and VC technologies integrated into the environment enabling a collaborative approach through greater connectivity across the business to share expertise, knowledge and storytelling.
  
  
• Material, furniture and workstation selections with sustainable attributes and/or accreditation.

View the Aurecon Centre photo gallery on Aurecon's Facebook page.