TVNZ Television Network Centre Refurbishment receives two international awards in one week.
“We’re proud to see our expertise and over 60 years of company heritage being honoured overseas, and look forward to delivering this same innovation in Australia." Scott Compton, Principal
Warren and Mahoney has taken out Best International Design at the 2017 Australian Interior Design Awards (AIDA) for the studio’s refurbishment of the Auckland TVNZ Television Network Centre.
The award marks the second occasion Warren and Mahoney has been internationally recognised by an Australian-based judging panel in a single week, after winning ‘Best in Category for Architectural Design: Interior Design’ at the 2017 Good Design Awards the day prior.
“We’re proud to see our expertise and over 60 years of company heritage being honoured overseas, and look forward to delivering this same innovation in Australia,” says lead designer and Principal Scott Compton.
The TVNZ Television Network Centre Refurbishment saw a dramatic redesign of the company’s existing award-winning building, first designed by Warren and Mahoney in 1989.
Significant upgrades were required to cater for the evolved television landscape, with the ability to continue live broadcasts on-site over the two-year construction period.
The project is described by AIDA judge Sonda Banney as a “Blade Runner inspired media city in the sky.”
A visible news hub at the centre of the building acts as the heart of the organisation, both physically and metaphorically.
“This highly connected and transparent workplace embodies the immediacy and adrenaline of the live media organisation it is home to,” Banney says.
“This digital colosseum is the stage for all personnel in at TVNZ to be ‘on air’.”
The ability to visually engage with the news hub via the remodelled floorplan provides more connectivity between floors, both vertically and horizontally, while simultaneously engaging its employees and visitors.
Warren and Mahoney designed the commercial atrium space in accordance with a campus style layout that speaks to the ‘hub and spoke system’ originally pioneered by the BBC (whereby various departments are set along each spoke with editors at the centre).
“It’s deceptively large. If it had been constructed as a tower, it would have been Auckland’s tallest at the time,” Compton says.
The interiors feature unique generated graphics by TVNZ’s production team Blacksand, reminiscent of film titles including the original Superman. Prominent local artists such as Flox, Andrew Steele and Greg Straight were commissioned to create large murals, adding vibrancy and a New Zealand narrative to the industrial-style volume.
The resulting design clearly expresses the identity of the company and people which are central to the organisation’s continual industry evolution. This approach sits at the core of Warren and Mahoney’s strategy; the design studio is vitally interested in the power of identity and its translation into embodied built form.
Warren and Mahoney has been heavily involved in designing for the modern workplace, not only implementing contemporary methodology in their projects, but actively developing new innovations required in this space. Principal Andrew Tu’inukuafe outlines key drivers and considerations of the company’s contemporary workplace design in the company-commissioned article, Out of Office, which places employee desires at the centre of good design.
“Workplace strategy, like business strategy, is a mix of data-driven reason and experience-based intuition. Not only do workspaces need to aid productivity on a functional level, but they must also be inspiring, generating collaboration, engagement and creativity,” Tu’inukuafe says.
View more about the project here.
