Ōtepoti

Ōtepoti is a four-storey office building which houses a government department’s 830 Dunedin-based staff. It has a steel and concrete structure with concrete rib and timber infill floors, lightweight timber partition walls and CLT stairs. The exterior features a distinctive high performance fritted façade. Inside, the floors revolve around a stunning cantilevered atrium staircase with a fritted glass balustrade. Our team delivered both the base build and the tenant fitout with unwavering attention to detail.

The neighbouring building was unreinforced masonry with rubble foundations. We designed and built a segmented retaining wall to contain and protect its foundations, carefully monitoring the impact of our ongoing works on the affected building.

The wedge-shaped building covers the entire site. With no room for external scaffolding, we redesigned the building edge detail with steel stubs supporting a secondary edge beam to project the slab beyond the structural building line, using light steel sheet to form edge and soffit supports as permanent formwork. We also rejigged the pre-cast slabs, which were originally too big to get to the site and too heavy to hoist, splitting the panels into 109 units and standardising them for efficient casting.

Appropriately in a building containing many energy saving features, we achieved an excellent 75% waste diversion rate, even pioneering several recycling streams in Dunedin. Our team hosted a steady stream of students and specialist industry groups throughout the project.

The project became a prominent case study for using BIM to drive safety and efficiency. Our BIM team embraced the challenge, combining the consultants’ and subcontractors’ 3D models to produce a federated model that we used for coordination and clash detection. Having the models and drawings available to all on a huge touchscreen proved an effective way to communicate details, improve understanding and facilitate collaboration.