Building Concept
The building has three primary ambitions:
1. To provide connectivity across all departments to enhance synergy between them.
2. To create maximum flexibility so that the building can accommodate programmatic changes in the future.
3. To achieve maximum sustainability through the compactness of the building mass and the adoption of a low-carbon materiality: timber.
The building has been designed as a very compact, single mass, organized around a central atrium which will provide visual and physical connectivity between the different departments, while acting as a thermal regulator and air-circulation inducer. In the summer, the atrium will act as a natural ventilation engine, making the air move upwards through buoyancy while extracting the air from the rooms naturally. In the winter it will act as a thermal buffer where the air will be naturally heated by greenhouse effects.
A helicoidal stair in the atrium will create a central feature linking physically all floors.