This low rise office building is not only beautifully designed, but also has amazing green credentials. Finished 2009, the building was developed and is managed by Stockland Commercial Property. The inside is modern, sleek and comfortable. While the outside provides stunning views of the river and urban setting. Woodhead Architects were tasked with the design responsibilities. The brief required them “to provide an inspired fit out that was safe, environmentally responsible, technologically enabled, optimistic and engaging.”
2 Victoria Avenue has achieved a 5 Star energy rating from the National Australian Built Environment Rating System, and as mentioned above this was something fundamental to the design. Several innovative measures were introduced to minimise the carbon footprint, including an active chilled beam system for air-conditioning and a grey water system to reduce water demand.
The building measures at 7,200m2 across four stories, and also has three wind turbines on the roof which help offset energy consumption.
[Pictures via Woodhead Architects]
This rather industrial looking USB hub distances itself from designer quality counterparts such as ones from LaCie. The latest Buffalo ‘expansion bar’ provides four USB ports, whose power can be controlled individually by a switch. So, if you don’t need that peripheral to operate 24/7, you can save some power and hence reduce some carbon footprint by turning off the device. This comes in very handy for those novelty USB gadgets without a power switch so you don’t have to unplug it every time you want them to stop humping.
Mario Cucinella is one of the greener architects in Italy; I loved his Casa 100K euro that we featured earlier. His Satander building is interesting too, billed as the first “Zero CO2 office building in Milan.” But the three storey building sits on stilts, so everyone will probably take the elevator, which they might not have done if it sat on the ground like a conventional building. The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability in Vancouver, on the other hand, takes carbon neutral to another level.
Indeed, there is a lot going on here. But if you are telling a green story, why put a three-storey building 42 feet up in the air so that everyone has to take an elevator to just get in? And what is the carbon footprint of making over half an acre of photovoltaics? After all, processing a tonne of silicon produces a tonne and a half of CO2, and a square meter of solar cells appears to carry a debt of 75 kilograms of CO2, or 187 Tonnes. Production of semiconductors like solar cells also uses a lot of chemicals like sulfur hexaflouride or nitrogen trifluoride, both notorious greenhouse gases. The engineer says that the photovoltaics will “avoid the pollution of 175 Tonnes of CO2 per year” so that carbon debt is paid off fast, but it still matters.