o-vert recently sponsored an “ideas” competition to elicit ideas for Omicron’s next office.  Omicron currently occupies their leased LEED-CI Gold premises in downtown Vancouver and is not planning an immediate move, but it is part of Omicron’s longer term strategy to build or renovate a building for ourselves in the future.  Any future office space would have to accommodate Omicron’s growing staff, be close to transit and amenities and be a model sustainable development.  The “Omicron Office Design Challenge” was established to allow all members of staff to contribute ideas for our future office.  The competition called for teams to select a building site (or an existing building for renovation) and to imagine an office space of 3,000 square meters which could be built or fit-out to achieve LEED-Platinum status and ultimately carbon neutrality.

Reflecting Omicron’s integrated structure, to qualify for the challenge, design teams were required to be constituted of multiple professional disciplines representing architecture, interior design, engineering, construction management and/or corporate services.  The integrated design teams then set about selecting their sites and designing their projects.  Taking as their premise, the notion that the greenest building is the one you don’t have to build, the 3 teams chose existing industrial buildings on the edge of the existing downtown core. 

Team “UN-DMC” chose to consolidate 3 existing buildings on the edge of Gastown and to link them internally with an atrium space.  The atrium space contains a series of timber, tree-like towers connected by bridges.  The platforms on the towers are socializing and meeting spaces.  This project developed a very sophisticated passive design strategy harvesting wind and solar to achieve carbon neutrality.

The other 2 teams chose buildings on the south side of False Creek, between the Cambie Street Bridge and Science World.  Team “Studio +” selected the “Opsal Steel Building”, a muscular, heavy timber warehouse structure dating from the early years of the 20th century; they inserted a new mezzanine within the skeleton of the existing structure.  The plan shapes of the rooms or spaces on the mezzanine were inspired by industrial components which were found on site during the team’s exploratory visit. 

Lastly, team “Eco B4 Deco” selected a fairly non-descript, industrial building from the middle of the last century which currently houses a reprographic shop.  With sunny pragmatism, the “Eco B4 Deco” team kept the repro house on site and renovated the remainder of the building to house Omicron.  With a nod to social sustainability, this project included a day care for the children of the many young parents who work for Omicron.  With minimal means, through a series of sensitive additions and deletions, the “Eco B4 Deco” team created an elegant, sustainable future home for Omicron.

The quality and range of all the submissions was very high.  All the teams exhibited great formal inventiveness combined with an enthusiastic engagement with the sustainability mandate.  There were great ideas and lots to like in each of the schemes.  After deliberation, a jury of Omicron Principals and Associates representing a professional cross-section of the company, selected “Eco B4 Deco” as the winning team.  The “Eco B4 Deco” team received a gift certificate for a Vancouver-based “green table” restaurant (http://www.greentable.net/) to celebrate their victory in sustainable style.