 | CH2 Six stars, but is it Architecture? The City of Melbourne’s new office building,
by Mick Pearce and DesignInc, is Australia’s first building to pursue biomimicry
as a design principle, while pushing sustainable design to new levels.
REVIEW Robert Morris-Nunn
PHOTOGRAPHY Dianna Snape
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Looking up across the open
timber slats of CH2’s west
facade, facing Melbourne’s
Swanston Street.
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Detail
of one of the wind turbines
crowning the building.
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Detail of the east facade.
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Oblique view of the
north facade balconies.
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Looking along the
Little Collins Street
facade, with the shower
towers lit.
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The west
facade as seen from
Swanston Street, with
shutters open. These
automatically open and
close in response to sun
angle and time of day.
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The west facade,
with shutters closed.
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The roof
terrace is lined with
wind turbines and
features David Wong’s
rock art installation.
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Open plan
office space.
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Looking down onto
the foyer space, with an
artwork by Janet
Laurence seen on the
far window.
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Downtown Melbourne has just hatched a cuckoo.
Its central business district is now home to an office
building very different from the array of other
edifices that the city has recently given life to. The
cuckoo is CH2, the City of Melbourne’s Council
House No. 2. Although the building is in no way a
form of hydrocarbon, its quirky name is significant
in giving the public a glimmer of insight that this
building is quite different from those surrounding it.
The building is probably Australia’s first urban
example of an architecture that is directly based on
biomimicry. Every aspect of the building has been
examined and rethought from first principles,
evolving new precepts that are based in the desire to
be as true as possible to the fundamental “laws of
nature”. The design philosophy is concerned with
developing appropriate architectural responses that
are a direct and honest expression of the biodynamic
relationships that nature uses in her own designs.
This has implications for the building’s architectural
form and for all the very sophisticated engineering
within it. The composition of this building – its
skin, its bones, its very innards – has been subjected
to rigorous reappraisal to attune it to natural
processes. This acknowledges the reality that we, as
a society, must develop more sustainable structures
to live and work in, if we are to survive as a species.
CH2, located in Little Collins Street and
overlooking Swanston Street, rehouses various
departments of the City of Melbourne in new,
open-plan accommodation. The building set out
to showcase advanced sustainable design and to
achieve a six-star energy rating. The City of
Melbourne believed that the best way to lead was by
showing just what is possible – the final building is
a working demonstration of a wide variety of
different engineering principles, all of which
contribute in some way to obtaining long-term
environmental benefits. One of these, the
development of the phase change medium that
stores heat energy, is truly groundbreaking in its
degree of innovation.
The architectural design that guides this
engineering is the result of a thorough
re-examination of the fundamental requirements
of the twenty-first-century office, and how these
functional needs can be best met on the limited
site available. Essentially, the building’s layout is
a floorplate free of internal columns, repeated and
stacked ten storeys high, with public lifts and stairs
at the south-western end looking over Swanston
Street, and a service core to the north-east of the
open interior, which also shields against direct
solar gain.
So, in addition to answering the technical
issues, does CH2’s design approach address the
formal precepts of being appropriate architecture,
as opposed to merely being good building? For me,
the answer is an overwhelming yes.
Mick Pearce, CH2’s creator along with
DesignInc, has based his entire professional career
on creating buildings that take their fundamental
design thinking directly from nature. Educated at
the Architectural Association in London, Mick has
spent most of his working life in Africa, especially
in Zimbabwe, where there are obvious and real
limitations to the ongoing deployment of many of
the mechanically based building technologies taken
for granted in the West. Mick has evolved
appropriate designs for urban African office
buildings, with solutions modelled directly on what
nature does in the same situation. Prior to CH2, he
completed a large office project in Harare, based on
the monumental termite mounds that populate the
open savannah. The building exactly mimics the
way these huge organic towers elegantly resolve the
basic issues of heating and cooling, indeed of all life
support systems, for their tiny inhabitants. Now
Mick has adapted his thinking to a tight urban site
in downtown Melbourne, showing how it is
possible to insert a design based on biomimicry into
an artificial urban environment. DesignInc’s
Stephen Webb and Chris Thorne worked with Mick,
helping to make it a very Australian building.
One of the measures of assessing a building
design based on biomimicry is whether it
successfully shows its innate qualities as a visually
resolved architectural form, rather than as a box full
of eco-tech objects.
CH2’s public face is the tall facade overlooking
Swanston Street, one of Melbourne’s great public
boulevards. It is entirely composed of timber
vertical slats covering a fully glazed wall. These
slats pivot vertically, opening and closing in
response to the time of day and the angle of the sun.
The facade is thus animated in direct response to
the external conditions. This is biomimicry at its
very best – the building moving and becoming alive
in response to the conditions surrounding it. The
facade also highlights a material normally banned
from the CBD, timber (in this case, all recycled),
showing that traditional natural materials do have a
place in the new urban Australian landscape.
The building’s crown houses another element
that aptly announces the design philosophy. Six
huge, bright yellow wind turbines are a fitting
visual tribute to the way air moves around CH2’s
interior, proclaiming way this building harnesses
another powerful natural resource, wind. Near the
location from which Ron Robertson Swann’s
“Yellow Peril” sculpture was ignominiously
removed several decades ago, these similarly
coloured, large metal objects announce a very
different set of sculptural values – engineering as
public art – with the mechanical forms used in the
harnessing of nature given a real visual prominence.
What is even better is the fact that the generator
inside is a direct adaptation of a domestic washing
machine motor. Could there be a more appropriate
symbol of an intuitive, adaptive design (and one that
seems so very Australian)? These large turbines top
the building in much the same way as turrets and
spires have traditionally done, and they make a
similar contribution to the downtown urban
roofscape, especially when one looks up Swanston
Street from Flinders Street Station.
Internally, the visual character of each of the
open floors is shaped by the large, wavy precast
concrete ceiling/floor elements that undulate
overhead. Part inner duct, part large surface of
exposed high-thermal-mass material, these elements
define the open workspace below. Interestingly, the
light levels have been kept reasonably low, and
low-energy tabletop task lights sit on every desk,
to be used when higher light levels are required.
In the first weeks of the building’s occupation, it is
this aspect that is drawing favourable comments
from the staff, who were apparently apprehensive
about shifting to such an open workplace. The
combination of individual lights and softer overall
lighting levels has been rated highly by users – they
say it makes them feel secure, further testimony to
the benefits of giving people at least some degree of
control over their surroundings. Plants also figure
prominently both inside and out. The provision of
vertical frames for climbing plants as “living
sunscreens” on the north-west facade and the upper
roof terrace will mean that the building will become
literally alive and green.
This is a very important building, not just for its
innovative engineering, but, far more significantly,
for the way that every single design element, both
spatial and non-spatial, has been resolved and
integrated to reinforce the concept of creating a
unique solution that mimics nature. The resultant
sum is far, far greater than the mere addition of its
constituent parts.
ROBERT MORRIS-NUNN IS DIRECTOR OF MORRIS-NUNN +
ASSOCIATES: ARCHITECTS.
CH2’S ENVIRONMENTAL ASPECTS ARE THE SUBJECT OF THE
PRACTICE PAGES IN THIS ISSUE. SEE PP 101–104.
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CH2, MELBOURNE
Architect and interior
design DesignInc
Melbourne in
association with the
City of Melbourne—City
of Melbourne: design
leader Mick Pearce.
DesignInc: design leader
Stephen Webb; design
architect Chris Thorne;
project architect Jean
Claude Bertoni; interior
design DesignInc
Melbourne—Aldona
Pajdak, Jacinda
Thornton. Services
engineer Lincolne Scott.
Environmental engineer
AEC. Structural and
civil engineer The
Bonacci Group.
Acoustics Marshall Day.
Quantity surveyor
Donald Cant Watts
Corke. Builder Hansen
Yuncken. Artists Janet
Laurence, Cameron
Robbins, David Wong.
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