Construction World April 2018

Sustainable modular flooring for Discovery’s offices

Leading flooring supplier, KBAC Flooring, provided and installed 60 000 square metres of flooring for the new impressive new head office of the Discovery Group in Sandton. The imposing building, on the corner of Rivonia Road and Katherine Street, comprises three linked office towers each featuring a ground floor, eight office floors, and a roof level to house Discovery’s gym and sports facilities. Designed by Boogertman + Partners, with the interiors specified by Paragon Interface Architects, the new iconic head office at 1 Discovery Place is the largest new building certified by the Green Building Council of SA (GBCSA), and has received a five-star Green Star rating. Lesley Fidrmuc, Interface Sales Consultant at KBAC Flooring, says KBAC’s popular and ultra-sustainable Interface modular flooring dominates the interiors, designed by Claire A’Dorante and her design team at Paragon Interface. KBAC, the sole Interface distributor in Southern Africa, supplied and installed the following Interface flooring: • Interface Composure: installed in five different colours, with Diffuse (30 000 m 2 ), and Solitude (16 000 m 2 ), serving as the two main ‘field carpets' with the other Composure colours interspersing and creating subtle curves throughout the building’s flooring. “The Interface Composure collection is exceptionally durable and easy to maintain, and therefore ideal for high traffic commercial or private spaces. The pile material consists of 100% solution dyed nylon which is extremely colour fast and resists fading,” Fidrmuc explains. • Interface Net Effect One: 1 200 m 2 installed in the public, and reception, as well as pause, areas alongside ‘high design’ bright coloured Interface Touch and Tones, Heuga 530 Ginger with toning Marmoleum sheeting of six colours also complementing the design. “The pause areas on each floor are demarcated by an individual colour,” Fidrmuc states. “In addition, KBAC installed Belgotex Westminster broadloom carpeting in the auditoriums, as well as Marmoleum Forbo sheeting for the roof gym areas,” she adds. Co-designer of the interiors of the acclaimed new building, Paragon Interface’s Anthony Karam, says: “The dynamic use of colours and textures is drawn from Discovery’s own corporate identity and conceptually drives the way through the eight levels of the Discovery campus building. Through a tactile and engaging environment, the design intent brings life and vibrancy to the atrium, and stimulates the ‘buzz’ around the building. We carefully selected the floor finishes to enrich the diverse user experience and deliver a memorable aesthetic throughout the building.” To create an environment centred on staff health and well-being, Paragon Interface incorporated both active and calm environments, formally structured throughout the building. The typical office floor plates are designed for activity-based working to enhance collaboration and business efficiency. Discovery took occupation of the property, jointly owned by Growthpoint and Zenprop, at the end of 2017. 

Eckart Zollner, Group Business Development, Jasco.

provided. How these technologies are deployed and aligned to customer needs will determine their success, however. For example, utilities are already under pressure to deliver. However, with no smart meters rolled out, they are finding it hard to manage demand, integrate and manage clean energy sources (e.g. PV and wind energy), and deliver services. As they move toward upgrading their systems, utilities need to identify high usage clients and align their services to meet these customers’ needs first. This will assist them to deliver lean, optimal and efficient services, which can be integrated with other services as intelligent smart city capabilities expand. The ICT provider will play a broader role, implementing ICT infrastructure but also co-ordinating between ser- vice providers. By ensuring services run on an integrated platform and providing suitable analytics or user apps, or access to these apps on hosted platforms, smart services become available. For example, by integrating electricity, water, sewage and waste collection on a single hosted platform, city dwellers can gain a smart view of service use and rates and taxes. Similarly, with traffic and security data (and possibly IoT and big data) on a single platform, users can identify congestion and optimise their travel schedules. Implement, manage, orchestrate As infrastructure is rolled out, citizens connect and services go live, cities will become smarter. To put the fun- damentals in place, smart governments and developers will choose partners that have strong technical and technology expertise but also broader integration, orchestration, strate- gic and management capabilities. Look for partners that: • Have broad industry experience, with an understanding the operations and priorities of different sectors and stakeholders • Can create strong collaborative relationships across and between sectors • Can do strategic planning and service rollouts based on customer needs and stakeholder readiness • Can offer data centre, interconnect and international connectivity • Can facilitate open access models, providing network control, management and maintenance • Offer smart city stakeholders integrated, shared and hosted platforms to flight their services • Have the data and analytics capabilities to enable multi- party services 

17

CONSTRUCTION WORLD APRIL 2018