Macquarie Bank, Sydney

8 June 2010

Sydney bank Macquarie invited Los Angeles design practice Clive Wilkinson Architects to create a new environment for staff and visitors in a building whose architecture was tailored to the bank’s requirements

Details

Project: Macquarie Bank
Architecture (base build): Fitzpatrick & Partners
Local executive architect: Woods Bagot
Interior design/Architecture: Clive Wilkinson Architects; Woods Bagot
Size: 30,700 sq m
Completion time: Three years

Project Description

Businesses and office designers have plenty to say about so-called new ways of working, but in practice concepts like ‘the mobile office’ and ‘activity- based working’ sometimes turn out to be little more than cost-cutting exercises.

But when it comes to really improving the way a business works, it’s hard to think of a better example than the new offices of one of Australia’s biggest investment banks, Macquarie. Here, the perfect synergy of three architecture practices, company directors, staff and user groups helped create a workplace that exemplifies modern working practices and, importantly, is overwhelmingly popular with the people who use it.

‘This was a three-year project where the brief evolved from initial assumptions into something much more adventurous,’ says Clive Wilkinson of Clive Wilkinson Architects.

‘The bank took on this building before it had been built and persuaded the developer to change the design to suit its needs. So we had this big opportunity to take this quite traditionally designed modern atrium and turn it into something much more adventurous.’

Wilkinson has called the result ‘part space station, part cathedral and part vertical Greek village’, and even if that seems a little fantastic, one has to admire the scale and accomplishment of the design.

The whole space has been designed around the concept of activity-based working, which was developed by Dutch consultancy Veldhoen. Simply put it means rather than sitting at the same desk in the same working environment each day, workers move around the office, choosing the right environment for the kind of work they’re doing, be it individual or group work, or a meeting.

Wilkinson’s design opened up the 10- storey atrium and created 16 meeting pods which allow clear lines of sight across the floor. ‘Guest relationships are very important for the client,’ says Wilkinson. ‘In its previous office the company had guest meeting rooms on one floor which seemed unconnected from the rest of the building, so clients would never actually see Macquarie at work.

‘This building became an opportunity to change that, to make the workings of Macquarie very visible to clients by distributing guest rooms or meeting pods vertically up through the atrium.’

The pods, which vary in shape and size, are furnished with Softshell chairs in a range of colours and high stools, both by Vitra. Some have Wilkahn’s Logon tables with laminate tops and polished aluminium bases, while others have Vitra’s Ad Hoc Table or custom-designed tables with glass tops.

Creating a ‘transparent’ workspace like this is all very well for creative businesses, but for investments banks security is tight. Wilkinson explains that great care was taken to ensure that to visitors, while able to see across the office, secure zones were just that.

‘When you’re in the meeting rooms, you can’t actually see what’s on anybody’s screen,’ he says. ‘Clients can get into the atrium and they can see around the building, but they don’t have free access. That’s been the excitement about the space: that everyone can see everyone else, so there’s this buzz of action all the time.’ Wilkinson considers his firm ‘a bit of a leftfield choice’ for the project, partly because the practice is based in Los Angeles, a 16- hour flight from Sydney, but the client wanted to the input of CWA’s creativity.

‘We designed Google’s HQ, we were working on Nokia’s HQ in Finland at the time, and we’ve done a lot of ad agencies and other creative workplaces,’ says Wilkinson. ‘The client really wanted to change the culture of the bank: how they work and how they interact.’

Each floor has its own aesthetic and a different setup to encourage workers to move around. The first floor has been designed around a ‘Main Street’, which leads to several diverse working environments including the business lounge, used for internal meetings.

‘The intent was to create strong volumes, visible from the Main Street and from outside the building,’ says CWA designer Neil Muntzel. Meeting rooms furnished with Eames chairs and tables have curved glass partitions printed with a geometric graphic based on the diagrid structure of the building. For informal meetings there’s also a bar, or ‘touchdown station’, designed by CWA and finished in white Corian.

Main Street also has its own retail bank, training rooms and breakout spaces furnished with interlocking ottomans designed by CWA and upholstered in Kvadrat’s Davina fabric in purple, orange and red. Also on the ground floor is a bespoke dining booth covered with Kvadrat’s Loop fabric in green.

‘As you go up the building, each floor has a unique area called a plaza, with a different theme on each floor to create unique destinations and drive traffic between the different floors,’ says Wilkinson.

The second floor Think Pod is a space where staff can escape the buzz of the main office and small groups can have informal discussions as they lounge on Moroso’s Surayama islands in blue, green and orange.

One of the most popular ‘plazas’ is the Coffee House on level 7. It has bespoke cut- out wooden chandeliers, chesterfield sofas and Tom Dixon Wingback chairs. Cut-out wooden partitions that echo the chandeliers separate the banquettes.

‘The notion behind both these cut-out panels and the custom chandeliers was to tie the architecture and graphic treatments together, says Muntzel. ‘They were intended to evoke a images of the archetypical Viennese cafe – which featured ornate patterns, wood and brass’.