10 March 10

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IN DETAIL: CORK CIVIC OFFICES Galvanised steel played a big part in the design for Cork Civic Offices. John Parker at ABK Architects runs through the design process The brief for this project was for additional offices to their existing offices in city hall. There was a suggestion in the brief that the building had to work or connect with the existing city hall accommodation, an idea we took very seriously. We basically integrated the two buildings so they work almost as one. It was a difficult site. It was quite restricted; there was a right of way across it which had to be taken on board. A lot of the adjacent properties all had windows or openings onto the site so you couldn’t build right up to the edge of the site. The other thing was that they had asked us to maximise the amount of floor area we could get on the site so our objective was to get as much office space onto the site as possible. And also we were building right up beside the city hall which in itself was quite a tricky thing. The client also had quite particular requirements, like car parking in the basement and on the roof so that was another complexity. Building up against the back of the city hall turned out to be really tricky in terms of foundations. Building a basement in what is basically the floodplain of the river Lee was pretty complex as well. It was quite a dense engineering exercise. When we completed the design we were looking to do a project that wasn’t just a typical curtain walling project. We find that a lot of curtain walling systems are very banal, they’re very highly finished and the technology is very slick. But it doesn’t give much texture or tactile qualities to the building. A lot of the buildings end up looking the same. We were anxious to make a building that had a material quality to it. So the outer skin of the glass block of the building is all done in galvanised flats that are suspended from a beam above. We made it all out of galvanised as opposed to making it out of stainless steel or aluminium so that it had this tactile, material quality to it. That was one of the characteristics that we particularly liked about galvanising, that it wasn’t smooth and slick and shiny but that it was actually tangible. It worked very well. From a distance it looks very sharp but as you get closer it has a much nicer sense of steel about it. It also plays off that slight textured matte quality and the smoother sections of the stone adjacent to it. When we were putting up that outer façade and we had just put up the galvanised steel flats, I think Cork City Council was very worried. They felt it looked too rough and that it looked a little bit matter-of-fact or crude. We had asked them to give us enough time to finish the project and it would be fine. I think in fact what happened was when we put the glass into it and it started to finish out, the play of the sharp edges of the glass and the reflectivity of the glass against the galvanised made it a completely different thing altogether. I think Cork City Council were really happy with it at the end of the day. There was that moment of doubt, I don’t think I was particularly worried but I know the client was, particularly because it was a design and build process. I think they thought they may be getting a raw deal, that it was a cheap solution as opposed to a good solution. And it was a cheap solution, there’s obviously an economic value doing galvanising. But that wasn’t the only driver. We considered doing stainless steel and decided not to. With regards the sustainability aspect of the building, there are a number of systems we’ve used which we’ve been developing over a number of projects including Offaly County Council and Tipperary County Council. In this one we’ve exposed the concrete structure of the building to act as a thermal sink to absorb the heat of the occupants during the day. To assist that we’ve cast in pipework into the slabs, a bit like underfloor heating pipework. During the summer months we run cool water taken from the floodplain under the site which is then pumped via heat exchanger into the slabs. We do that in reverse in winter months. Basically it’s like underfloor heating but over your head which gives a very economic and stable heating environment for the offices which is, in turn, very efficient. Obviously it has costs because you’re using electricity to pump water around the place but ultimately it’s cheaper. We’ve used these wind cowls on the roof which avail of the prevailing winds of Cork to force air through really large chimneys into the floors of the office spaces. So we’re using wind power just to push air into the building so there’s a constant supply of fresh air in the offices. The galvanised double façade is obviously giving solar protection to the building and wind protection for people opening windows. The galvanised façade also does a lot of work in shading the building.

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