Henry Deane Plaza, Sydney, Australia

A Rice Daubney Scheme

Located in the South of Sydney's CBD, between Central Station and Railway Square is the new Henry Deane Plaza commercial development design by architects Rice Daubney. Consisting of three 7 to 9-storey commercial buildings, grouped around a large plaza, the lower plaza is boarded by retail and forms part of the busy pedestrian connection from Central Station to George Street. The unique façade of the development is strong, articulated and modulated, clad in a specially developed, energy efficient terra-cotta cladding system, which weathers extremely well. The fenestration and cladding materials are designed to provide a contemporary response to the adjacent brick heritage buildings, and the crisp terra-cotta cladding imparts a warm grainy texture to the facades and is used to unify the buildings.

Rice Daubney worked closely with Sydney City Council and the State Government to achieve an innovative urban design solution, incorporating the major pedestrian thoroughfare. The development has revitalised the Railway Square precinct, and become a landmark in the southern gateway to the city of Sydney. The complex has high exposure to over 40,000 pedestrians converging on Central Station daily.

Henry Deane Plaza was a finalist in the Property Council of Australia (PCA) Rider Hunt Award, 2003; won the Master Builders Australia 2001 National Environment and Energy Efficiency Award for Commercial Buildings; and was runner up in the Sustainable Energy Development Authority (SEDA) Building Greenhouse Rating Scheme Leadership Award.

The State Government initiated the development of the disused railway maintenance yard adjacent to the Central Railway Station by competitive tender process, which was won by Australand, one of Australia's largest property developers ( www.australand.com.au). Baulderstone Hornibrook constructed the three-building development under a design and construct contract in three distinct development stages.

All three stages of the development were designed and documented solely in ArchiCAD. ArchiCAD's flexibility as a CAD system, one that allows easy and instant changes to the design, gave Rice Daubney the opportunity to create different design schemes and make alterations while still keeping up with the tight deadlines. Each building was able to be modelled in ArchiCAD within a couple of weeks during the early concept stages.

"The biggest help was that none of us had to duplicate work already done by other team members. We got all the sections and elevations from the 3D model itself," says Carolyn Miles, architect and associate director at Rice Daubney. "In addition to obtaining all the sections and elevations from the central model, ArchiCAD could just as easily generate exterior and interior perspectives and animated fly-throughs, much appreciated by the authorities and the client, and helped describe the scheme to local action groups."

"The building has been designed to embody environmentally sustainable solutions and is now being used as a benchmark for future NSW government buildings." explains Tony Fabro, design director of Rice Daubney "a terra-cotta façade system was chosen as a modern interpretation of the red brick character of the precinct. Low emission double-glazing ensures the maximum penetration of natural light into the office floors, while minimising heat and noise loads.

Up to tender documentation, only three people were involved in the project. Carolyn Miles was the project design architect and she developed the 3D model, with two others assisting with the planning. Considering the size of the scheme, it was a very small team, which only grew to six at detail documentation stage.

The project used ArchiCAD's ability to allow the easy creation of 3D library part objects (more than 50 different cladding panel objects were created as part of the scheme's development) to develop the design of the façade panels. After modelling the initial scheme of the design, making alterations meant only simple modification to library part elements - all the other relevant drawings of the project, from which the details were extracted (floor plans, sections and elevations) were updated automatically.

Rice Daubney was established in 1976, and has since evolved into one of Australia's leading architectural and consulting practices. "What differentiates Rice Daubney from other architectural practices is our commercial focus. Our solutions are tailored to each project, the client's needs and market positioning.." says John Daubney, the co-founder and Principal of Rice Daubney "Our commercial focus is verified by our having won more Property Council of Australia (PCA) awards in the last 10 years than any other architectural practice. Part of how we achieve this is through our technology systems. Our use of technology is always innovative and provides the creative thrust for pursuing the objective of continuous improvement in our knowledge assets."

".We use ArchiCAD, which we believe is currently the most advanced CAD system for architects." Graeme Smith, Principal of Rice Daubney says ".we aim to ensure that our clients receive information on market trends, design and technological advances that are at the forefront of global thinking. Using ArchiCAD, we construct a virtual building for all projects to test and develop our designs, which helps our clients to fully visualize and explore the building; this then follows straight into our documentation."

Rice Daubney was one of the first architectural firms in Australia to break away from traditional CAD methods and to work in 3D for the entire design and documentation process. "They got in fairly early on the ground floor in 1986 with desktop technical drafting using GDS and Eagle, before many other larger firms were tackling CAD," explains Nigel Sullivan, Rice Daubney's CAD Manager. "They had been using CAD software for more than 10 years before switching to ArchiCAD. They used this expertise to implement a comprehensive research and testing program to choose a new CAD system when GDS was no longer supported. ArchiCAD was introduced to the company in 1996. The fact that they chose a progressive 3D object-oriented software package shows Rice Daubney's upper management was committed to innovative technologies."

"We are very proud of what we are achieving with ArchiCAD at Rice Daubney." says Nigel Sullivan "and we are still developing future possibilities with the software, such as facilities management and interoperability over an extranet."

Nigel Sullivan joined Rice Daubney's CAD Group in 2002. He brought with him expertise in AutoCAD and MicroStation. He says "it is great to work with ArchiCAD, because it delivers all the documents, at all stages from a simulated project model. On other CAD systems, we would produce highly detailed 3D models for presentations to win work, but we could never take this into the detailed documentation stage. It felt like we were throwing away our hard work, and if the client needed to review the project during the tender documentation stage we could only show them 2D documents."

"Using ArchiCAD's stories, teamwork functions and module hotlinking, we generate each building within a single CAD file." explains Nigel ".this means that we do not have to invent an elaborate abbreviated naming convention or folder structure for each project - ArchiCAD does this work for us, which makes it easier to train users."

"Using ArchiCAD gives us so many advantages, and we look forward to the day that all our clients, builders, consultants and contractors are able to link into the one simulated building model. This will result in massive increases in efficiency and cost effectiveness for a project, and will end the extensive document paper trail currently used in the construction industry."

Rice Daubney currently employs over 70 professional staff, and has 34 ArchiCAD version 8 licenses, which they are planning to expand to 44 over the next year.

( www.ricedaubney.com.au)