Tower Offices – Auckland
Tower’s new Auckland workplace extends across an entire level, connected by two footbridges spanning a central atrium, an expansive office space designed to better serve the mission of the insurance company.
STACK designed the Tower offices with dark tones and strong materials for their space in Auckland, New Zealand.
An upgrade from a relatively disjointed interior, the move to a larger single level floorplate enabled Tower to better connect departments previously siloed across several floors. The strategy shifted their workstyle over to a fully agile desk sharing approach.
The brief, developed with Tower’s leadership team, was to design a ‘High Energy Digital Workspace’ by creating agile and intuitive ‘neighbourhoods’ which were highly connected not just internally, but to their wider network nationally and across the Pacific, through an advanced technology offering.
Effective space utilisation drove the centralisation of staff social spaces around the atriums at the centre of the floor and at the intersection of all circulation. Considerations included selecting furniture with dual purpose, for dining and socialising but also for drop-in mobile working and team collaboration, maximising use of the space throughout the day.
The remainder of the space is allocated to three neighbourhoods of roughly 100 work-points each. At the centre of each neighbourhood is a huddle space, comprising adaptable lounge and standing furniture, allowing intimate or large groups to gather for team catchups and informal hybrid meetings with offsite teams.
Strong use of Tower’s blue and yellow is a key feature of the design. Tower wanted people to know where they were and feel part of the team. The use of angles often in the form of a zigzag references the business desire to continue ‘thinking out of the box’, and ‘zig while others zag’. Highlighting these angles with bold coloured LED ‘zigzag’ lighting helps to create the highly energised and innovative workplace that Tower required.
The new workplace supports Tower and their partners as they work together in-house, along with a further challenging requirement to include a large, enclosed seminar space that could be used for market ‘TED-type’ talks, as well as internal gatherings.
The response included designing a front of house visitor lounge which includes a suite of plug and play open plan agile workspaces and several enclosed meeting spaces. An operable glazed wall forms a 20-person presentation space that can be redeployed to a completely different configuration, forming a soundproof barrier between the front of house greeting area and providing a 100+ person seminar space. By creating a transformable space, a far more effective utilisation of the leasable space was achieved.
Design: STACK
Design Team: Jesse James Smith, David Plaistowe, Jacquette Barrington, Iva Parapunova, Sally Vandal
Photography: Mark Scowen
