Architect and Builder Magazine South Africa January/February 2015 | Page 38

and lift areas. Change rooms and showers
are provided in the basement parking for
employees to refresh after a bicycle ride to
the office.
The fire protection system has been
designed not to expel any water during testing.
Water is directed back into storage tanks.
Motion occupancy sensors detect when
spaces are not occupied and switch off light
fittings accordingly.
At least 57% of the office area has natural
daylight levels sufficient to allow lighting to be
turned off during daylight hours.

The superstructure
is supported by 13
shear beams that span
31,9m x 1,5m x 2m
at parking level 0

rubble removed from site was reused by
Skipwaste in brick production.
The site location is approximately 8
kilometres from Alexandra which is where
the majority of general labour was sourced.
The project aim was to source at least 80% of
materials within 50 to 400 kilometres from the
site and this objective was achieved.
Sustainability
The building has achieved a Four Star Green
Star SA – Office V1 Design rating. A number of
sustainable aspects include:
Fuel-efficient vehicles are catered for with
33 parking bays provided. These parking bays
are conveniently located near the escalators

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Wet Services
Apart from the standard Wet Services
design applicable to a Green Star Building,
Sutherland’s (formerly GK Pereira) design
managed to capture a large percentage of the
roof rainwater into a single piped system and
collect this water into a concrete storage tank
in the lowest basement. This water is then
filtered, cleared and used for all toilet and
urinal flushing throughout the building.
One of the interesting challenges was how
to get the rain water into a storage tank in
the third basement level, with a street level
overflow to rain water system, as well as having
an automatic main council water by-pass for
when there is no rain water available. This was
achieved using a float control that would only
allow council mains water into the tank when
the rain water level dropped below 30% full.
The building is fitted with an industrial
kitchen to provide high level catering to all
tenants. The kitchen drainage system is piped
to a stainless steel grease separator and is
fitted with non-return valves to ensure no soil
contamination into the system.

15 Alice Lane South