Employee interaction across functions

The five-storey building boasts a compact form and an intelligent arrangement of internal spaces, especially with regard to climate change adaptation. The open-plan design provides flexible and multifunctional workspaces that are visible and easily accessible from wherever one is in the building, thanks to the simplicity of our circulation design and to the spacious and welcoming atrium around which everything fits. The arrangement facilitates easy interaction between colleagues from different departments, thereby improving the likelihood of serendipitous and planned inter-disciplinary collaboration.

The atrium constitutes the heart of the building in every respect. It’s where clients are welcomed and where visitors come to marvel at the company’s latest innovations. It also abuts the meeting rooms, which are glass-walled, allowing their occupants can see what’s going on in the atrium. The atrium accommodates the staff canteen, but does without the usual demarcation of functions, so that the space between the two remains completely uninterrupted, the one merging with the other. Such overlaps and the visual accessibility of functions also help to promote interaction.

Three functions under one roof

Three functions under one roof The customer experience centre and the research and development centre are both on the ground floor. The former is where the interactive product demonstrations and public exhibitions of the company’s latest innovations take place. And while customers explore the innovations downstairs, the company’s non-research staff in the four floors above are busy at work on the innovations to come, in open-plan offices that lend themselves to easy adaptation according to the company’s future needs.

Built-in sustainability

Aside from facilitating an elevated physical experience of the building via its design, we also gave considerable thought to the building’s effect on the planet, and employed several measures to minimise its energy consumption. For instance, the elevators operate on a regenerative drive system that allows them to recover some of the energy they consume. We used heat-reflective glass throughout the building, thereby minimising the need to cool interior spaces by other means. Any surplus warm air is stored underground for later use. And all timber employed in construction was FSC-certified. These and other measures helped earned the building a “Very Good” BREEAM rating of environmental performance.