Alan MacDiarmid Building - Education

Client:          Victoria University of Wellington

Project Brief

Located in the Kelburn Campus, the appropriately named teaching and research building has 4 levels of teaching space, plant and equipment on the 5th floor and 2 basement floors.
Offices, seminar rooms, laboratories and support space make up the majority of the facilities, along with a café and link spaces on the ground floor.
As a teaching centre of future innovators, it is very fitting that the building is the first PRESSS (Precast Seismic Structural System) building of its kind built in NZ.
The PRESSS system is designed using displacement based design. Rather than designing the building elements to fail at designated locations, PRESSS utilises small sacrificial elements to dampen earthquake loadings. The long unbounded steel tensioning strands act as elastic bands stretching during earthquakes and restoring the building to its correct position.
The building is clad in curtain wall glazing and aluminium composite panel, with profiled metal roofing.
The combination of being a science building and being electronically smart to ensure the teaching facility is world-class means the building services installation is the most complex part of the project. 32 flues are a feature of the roofline and many kilometres of wiring are threaded throughout the building.
Award: 2009 New Zealand Concrete Society – Technology Award and Supreme Concrete Award.