Bligh Voller Nield has transformed a dinosaur into an examplar.

Almost certainly, write Frank Duffy. I should never have come across the Stockland had I not visited the building during a DEGW Workplace Forum event in Sydney last year. My Australian colleagues, who had worked on the project with the architects, Bligh Voller Nield (BVN), drew my attention to the project. What BVN has achieved is much more than a one-off intervention in an obsolescent office building. In the context of technological and environmental change, Stockland is quite the opposite: a prototype with profound and generic international significance.

Greening old office buildings

Enthusiasm for the green design of new buildings is all very well, but what are we going to do with the vast stock of existing buildings? Many such buildings are liable to be prematurely categorised as ‘dogs’, not always inaccurately. However, the practice of tearing down and replacing them, although routine among developers, is not obviously the best way of husbanding the planet’s scarce resources. In London it will take perhaps four or five decades to replace the existing office stock, even at the present, relatively rapid rate of rebuilding. Meanwhile, our options for greening the existing office stock are to re-clad and re-engineer obsolescent buildings, to manage their environmental performance more rigorously, and, most important in my opinion, to use them more intensively. Exercising these options, given the vast bulk of the existing office stock, it is strategically more important than designing sustainable new buildings.

The radical refurbishment of eight floors of a high-rise office building in Sydney, owned and partially occupied by the prominent Australian property company, Stockland, is a striking example of exploiting the last of these options. The result has been the radical transformation of a large part of the interior (of what some considered an architectural pig’s ear) into something a lot more useful, intelligent and capable of being more intensively used.

Dark cores, empty atria

Certain design problems are common even in the most handsome high-rise office buildings. One of the most intractable of these is the curse of the central core – the opacity of entry and vertical movement, inherent in buildings with central cores diminishes the experience of entering and of internal movement. However efficient such buildings may be from a developers perspective – they minimise circulation and maximise naturally lit, lettable floor area – the experience of entering the lift, pressing the button and being carried up to the 50th floor is generally something of an anti-climax until you step out of the lift – and by no means always then.

The second problem is the downside of that popular architectural device – the atrium. Atria are much used in office design for mostly visual reasons but also, more sensibly, because of a reaction against a minimalisation of the importance of movement implicit in conventional cental core office buildings. Many architects have attempted to use atria to enliven and enhance users’ experience of the office as whole and to celebrate and enliven circulation. The downside is that atria on their own, disconnected from circulation, neither celebrate nor enliven. Rather the opposite – they exaggerate emptiness. Dead atria are common – fine in architectural photographs but empty, gloomy and oppressive in actual use. High-rise atria are particularly disappointing, exciting in theory but in practice not working anything like hard enough because they are so often dead ends, leading us nowhere in more ways than one.

Place in an increasingly virtual world

This is why the Stockland project is so interesting. The trigger was that Stockland recognised that its former organisational structure was divisive. Given the invisible cloud of information technology that connects us all, everywhere, all the time, office work now has a different meaning. It is no longer necessary to go to work in order to work. In an increasingly virtual world that attracts people to actual, physical workplaces is the opportunity to interact, to operate in interdepartmental, plural, gregarious ways, to exchange and develop ideas, to put themselves about, to take advantage of semi-accidental but highly beneficial encounters. The term that Horace Walpole so usefully coined over two centuries ago – serendipity – has a renewed relevance in the contemporary world of work.

Stockland’s building in its original state was not designed for interaction. The big, boat-shaped, more or less column-free floor plates with 14m deep office space surrounding a central core, were designed to accommodate rows of desks and office enclosures in the way that had become customary in North American, Taylorist office design.

What BVN has done for Stockland is much more sophisticated. Given the eight floors that it wished to occupy and given Stockland’s requirement to prioritise interaction between functions and activities, the architects proposed cutting out one bay on every floor Stockland would occupy – a loss inefficiency in conventional space-planning terms, but a price well worth paying. The result is continuous sequence of transparent open stairwells, adjacent to and linking a varied series of meeting rooms and informal meeting and social spaces, some quite large, others tiny and intimate. Quite literally a major new potential for internal discourse has been opened up. The architectural stroke of genius was to stagger this micro atrium all the way down, forward and backward, to maximise openness and visibility from floor to floor. Located in exactly the right spot on the floor plate, near the main bank of lifts but towards the corner of the floor plate designated for meeting spaces, the spatial impact of the combination of staggered atrium and open, informally planned flights of stairs on all eight floors is amazing. The image that BVN’s project architect, Abbie Galvin, used to explain the concept to the client is the tree house in The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton, an author popular with Abbie’s children but not until now regarded of as an architectural theorist.

More important than the spatial impact, however, is the social impact of this bold design on Stockland’s business. Practically, in terms of fire protection and means of escape, the necessary compartmentalisation has bee made possible by electronically operated, horizontal fire shutters. Symbolically the continuous stair demonstrates commitment to unity, coherence and communication. Operationally the staggered stairwell is an interactional tour de force.

Intensifying space use

The Stockland project provides a glimpse of a livelier, more humane future for the office as a social and intellectual place rather than a mere place of work. It is a major step toward generating the architectural forms that are appropriate for the knowledge economy. The ideas that have created Stockland are parallel to and will be as important at the urban as the architectural scale. Recognising that office work is knowledge work, and that knowledge workers are both mobile and gregarious, has enormous implications for the intensification of space use within buildings, for eroding the boundaries between building types and for reviving the use of the interstitial and complementary spaces that cities used to be so good at providing. Not least, the Stockland project demonstrates how office space can be used more intensively.

With any luck, and with clients as intelligent as Stockland and architects as imaginative as BVN, we will be able to escape from our typological straitjackets, make work more enjoyable and, by driving the use of office space (and hopefully urban space) harder, help to save the plant.