500 Collins Street is Australia's first tenanted high-rise CBD office refurbishment to achieve the Green Building Council of Australia's five star Green Star rating.
Contents
Summary
500 Collins Street is a 30-year-old 28-level multi-tenanted refurbished office building that has achieved a 5 GreenStar rating. It provides an important example for the large pool of existing commercial building stock which contributes heavily to the performance of the commercial building sector as a whole. Significantly, it is has been monitored before and after the upgrade and indicates improved occupant productivity.
Commercial Office NLA: 23,870 m2
Total NLA: 25,500 m2
Owner: Kador Group
Project Team Members:
- Bovis Lend Lease Consulting (project management)
- Sustainable Built Environments (environmental consultant)
- Peddle Thorp Architects (architect)
- Robert Bird Consulting (structural)
- Connell Mott MacDonald (façade)
- Umow Lai & Associates (building services)
- Murchie Consulting (independent commissioning agent)
- Alexander and Associates (hydraulic)
- Napier & Blakeley/DCWC (quantity surveyors)
- Gardner Group (building surveyors)
- SJB Planning (planning)
- JCK Consulting (DDA)
- Noel Arnold and Associates (hazardous materials)
- Great Forest Australia (waste management)
- Grogan Richards (car park)
- Ratio (traffic)
- Kate McGready & Associates (artistic)
- Marshall Day (acoustic)
- Landarche (landscaping)
- ECS Property Group (property management)
- Bovis Lend Lease (building)
Checklist of sustainable features
Energy
Indoor Environmental Quality
Productivity
Water
Waste
Materials
Transport
Building Rating: Five GreenStar certified rating
Motivations and lessons
The owner's view - an interview with Paul Martin (Director, Kador Group)
28 May 2007
What are the main reasons why your company chose to do a sustainable building?
Firstly we had an environmental policy and a firm commitment at board level.
We bought the property with a view to upgrading it as a commercial opportunity.
Although it was early days in terms of ESD, we believed an environmental approach made business sense and was the way the market would go in the future.
This type of upgrade opportunity only occurs about once every 30 years. We didn't want to do an upgrade and regret it later. Maybe we were a little bit ahead of the market, but we thought the demand for ESD property in the future was likely to only get bigger.
What are the best things that have come out of doing a sustainable building?
In a commercial sense we are finding that the market place has really picked up and there's much more awareness and demand for the ESD product. In the early days, back in 2002/3 maybe it was seen as ambitious, but looking at it now there's a lot more interest and demand for sustainable buildings. The market has really moved and environmental issues are really big on everyone's agenda.
One thing it's done for our company, and the wider property industry, is that it demonstrated that old energy inefficient buildings can be upgraded to a high quality sustainable outcome with tenants in place. When you look at the environmental impact of commercial buildings, one of the real challenges is what to do with the existing stock which accounts for most of the environmental impact. It's relatively easy to design a brand new green building and get it right from the start. It's another thing to take on an existing building such as 500 Collins St, and transform it into a sustainable building.
We've undertaken a productivity study co-funded by Sustainability Victoria. We've tracked two tenants who've moved from the old to the new. The final report will be available shortly and involves qualitative as well as quantitative measures. There's a dramatic shift in comfort, acceptability, and general well being, as well as an increase in productivity. The study included a typing test for speed and error rate as one of the quantitative measures. All indicators were very positive.
What are the things that you did that made the project work well?
It was fairly unusual to undertake such a major project while we had tenants in place. We upgraded three floors at a time while the rest were occupied, and we had to manage this very carefully. Our management team was terrific at keeping our tenants informed through direct contact and newsletters, and in managing any complaints that arose.
Early on in the project we engaged an ESD consultant. They were the second appointed after the project manager and this was essential as ecologically sustainable design was new to us all. Through the ESD consultant everyone on the design team gained knowledge of ESD principles. Every decision we made had to pass by the ESD consultant, like an ESD audit process throughout the design. Another benefit of the ESD consultant was that his brief was to put up as many initiatives as possible for consideration, and although some were rejected, we felt satisfied that we had at least considered all possibilities.
Having the same builder for all the stages of the project who was also committed to ESD helped the process. We engaged Bovis Lend Lease - initially we went out to tender for the first stage and then negotiated subsequent stages. The benefit of this approach was that they knew our ESD objectives and they developed an understanding of the property, which meant they didn't need to "re-invent the wheel" on each subsequent stage. As an example, chilled beam air conditioning was relatively new in Australia, so Bovis Lend Lease needed to develop an understanding of the installation issues, which they then applied on subsequent stages. An example of the shared ESD approach was our policy for recycling of construction waste which was also part of Bovis Lend Lease's practice.
What were the things that didn't work quite so well and how were they managed?
The joints in the duct work contained a hazardous material and had to be removed. This opened up the opportunity to investigate an innovative air conditioning system in the form of chilled beam technology. This turned a negative into a positive. It overcame the hazardous material in the duct work and led to an innovative system that also freed up ceiling space.
When we first started the floor upgrade we recognised the potential for noise problems. During the first stage of the floor upgrades we developed procedures to minimise the noise. We carried out demolition and strip out works at night and kept carpet on the floor for as long as possible to reduce the noise for the tenants below. Noise was an issue that had to be managed carefully to avoid disturbing the tenants.
Initially we were a bit disappointed about our water reduction achievements in that we didn't put in the big ticket items such as grey and black water systems. Unfortunately they didn't stack up economically (in terms of payback) at the time and we didn't physically have the space. However we did manage to put in many smaller initiatives which added up to big water savings as reflected in the water component of the Green Star rating. It would be fair to say that 5 years on from this project, if we were to commence the project today we would try a bit harder on the water initiatives. Back then water wasn't as big an issue as it is now.
Chilled beam at level 14 on 500 Collins Street(left);
Plant room - digital control unit in monitoring air conditioning, water, reading controls on chiller unit (right).
Source: Department of the Environment and Water Resources; Photographer: Erica Lauthier.
Other information and resources on 500 Collins Street
Quotes
"Commissioning - key to success
Commissioning management has been an integral process during the refurbishment, in the form of a 12-month commissioning plan with quarterly checks, written by Warwick Stannus of AG Coombs. Stannus says the commissioning plan was written to make sure the designer's intentions will be met once the refurbished building is fully operational. "There was a fair amount of work to do to capture all the relevant design input, and actually translate that into something that is the long-term operating and maintenance standard," he says.
He says a large part of the value in commissioning on a complex project like this is the ability to feed information back to the designers, so they can benefit from the lessons learned. Stannus says investment in commissioning management also saves money and time down the track, by ensuring the property runs as it was designed to well into the future. To ensure the property at 500 Collins Street will do exactly that, the building operations manager, Harry Hullin, was included in commissioning meetings
from an early stage of the project. Hullin has been the onsite manager at 500 Collins Street for over 30 years, and brought extensive knowledge of the building's services to the project. "With a building management system you should be hands on, you shouldn't rely on a contractor," he says.
According to Martin, Kador Group was determined that Hullin would play his part in the commissioning process to ensure the future smooth running of the building.
"He knows the building backwards. He's an integral player and should be involved in the commissioning," Martin says.
In an episode demonstrating the value of commissioning, the chilled beams were tested after delivery from UK supplier Frenger, and it was found they were not performing as designed - they had been set up incorrectly in the factory and then damaged during unloading. Frenger sent a representative over from the UK to readjust the beams,
and the problem was fixed, ensuring the beams would run as designed."
Extract from
Carey, A. (2006) Sustainability - One Step at a Time, EcoLibrium, AIRAH
Full article available can be viewed on the AIRAH website:
http://www.airah.org.au/downloads/2006-02-F02.pdf
Other case studies or fact sheets
Green Building Council of Australia - Case Study on 500 Collins Street
Feature in EcoLibrium, AIRAH
http://www.airah.org.au/downloads/2006-02-F02.pdf
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