‘Outstanding’ challenge
Professional services group PricewaterhouseCoopers wanted its planned new London headquarters to set the highest sustainability standards for offices – which meant the project team having to raise the bar half way through the building’s development. Andy Pearson reports
T We had the
opportunity with the design process for the building to take a blank sheet of paper and raise the bar – Roger Reeves
here is a new landmark on the south bank of the Thames in east London. Alongside Tower Bridge is 7 More London which, despite its conventional, glazed corporate appearance, is
significant in being the first building in the capital – and the first major speculative office in the UK – to have been awarded a BREEAM Outstanding rating. Moreover, when the designers started work on this building back in 2006, the rating did not exist. The fact that the designers have succeeded in
creating what has potential to be one of the greenest office buildings in the capital is partly attributable to the determination of its future tenant, the global business consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers. PwC wanted its planned headquarters to set a new standard in office design. The result is very much down to the close collaboration between developer, More London, the environmental engineer for the building’s shell and core design, Roger Preston and Partners, and the tenant’s fit-out design team led by architectural and engineering consultancy, BDP. The result of all this collaborative effort is currently
nearing completion. 7 More London is the final and largest building to be constructed under the masterplan for the More London site. The 10-storey, 60,000 sq m building incorporates 48,000 sq m of office space located above retail units set at ground and lower ground level. Construction of the building’s shell is complete –
its glazed, symmetrical wings of offices open out to embrace the river revealing a hollow circular drum, housing the reception, at its core. Three curved bridges connect these two wings at levels two, five and eight, while at the rear the building’s southern elevation drops to seven storeys to respect the existing buildings along Tooley Street. Inside work is under way to fit out the offices ready for occupation in early 2011.
26 CIBSE Journal July 2010 The project was conceived in 2006 as having the
potential to meet the PwC’s vision for the design of sustainable office buildings, says Bob Spittle, chairman of environmental engineering at BDP. At the time of its selection, the building’s shell and core design was at outline design stage (RIBA C), with a planning requirement to achieve a minimum environmental rating for speculative office development of BREEAM Very Good (2006). But PwC pushed the developer and its design team, along with BDP, to target the highest level of environmental performance attainable at that time, BREEAM Excellent (2006). ‘We had the opportunity with the design process for
the building to take a blank sheet of paper and raise the bar, both for ourselves and others, in the sustainability performance of buildings,’ says Roger Reeves, a partner at PwC. Accordingly both Roger Preston and Partners and
BDP set about designing to achieve BREEAM Excellent. As the building’s engineering design progressed, however, details began to emerge of an upgrade to BREEAM and the impending release of BREEAM Offices 2008. This was a blow to the design teams because the upcoming revision not only proposed to significantly increase the criteria needed to achieve the Excellent rating, it also proposed the introduction of mandatory credits for criteria such as the provision of storage space for recyclable waste, along with changes to the weighting for certain design criteria. The revision even proposed the introduction of additional design credits for innovation to encourage a new approach to environmental design. But the biggest change of all was the proposal to add the elite rating of Outstanding to the BREEAM classification system, which meant their building would no longer count as one of the very best. What made matters even worse for the design teams
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