Arup engineers a sustainable agenda in its new offices

Engineering firm Arup has moved from its Wellington Road offices to a new, sustainable, staff-friendly home in Ringsend, writes Environment Editor Frank McDonald

ARUP, the global design consultancy, has long been at the cutting-edge of modern building technology. So it is entirely appropriate that the firm's Irish branch recently vacated an amalgam of Victorian houses on leafy Wellington Road and moved into a cutting-edge building in Docklands.

Designed by Fitzgerald Kavanagh + Partners, the new office block rises out of the brick front of the former Irish Glass Bottle Company's headquarters, a restrained Art Deco-style 1930s building chiefly noted for its early use of glass block, surmounted by a clock; the new building is all the better for having retained this history.

Ove Arup, a Dane born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, was one of the legendary engineers of the 20th century, and the firm he founded in 1946 was imbued with a strong ethos of professional service; its string of credits include Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Øresund bridge linking Denmark and Sweden.

Indeed, it was the brilliant Dundalk-born structural engineer Peter Rice, then still in his 20s and working for Arup, who figured out how to make the opera house stand up - using orange segments as his inspiration.

It was also Rice who devised the structural system for the Pompidou Centre, working with Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.

More recent projects on which Arup has worked worldwide include the Channel Tunnel, Norman Foster's 30 St Mary Axe, in the City of London (commonly known as "The Gherkin"), Anthony Gormley's Angel of the North, the Torre Bicentenario in Mexico City, and Treasury Holdings' Dongtan Eco-city project on Chongming Island, near Shanghai.

The trials of being structural engineers when things go wrong were illustrated by the Millennium Bridge in London. When this laterally suspended structure started wobbling after it opened in May 2000, Foster + Partners - who had designed it - referred press queries to Arup, who retro-fitted "dampers" to stabilise the bridge.

The firm's first Irish venture was the Busáras in Dublin. A shortage of steel after the second World War led Michael Scott to call in Ove Arup, then a leading designer of reinforced concrete structures. He established an office above Scott's in 19 Merrion Square, and the firm - then with 30 staff - relocated to Wellington Road in 1961.

Now employing 10 times that number in Dublin alone, several options were considered before the decision was made to move to Ringsend Road. "We looked at how people could get to the office by public transport, and we were also conscious that most of our clients are around this area," says Tim Corcoran, head of the Dublin office.

A multidisciplinary practice that embraces structures, roads, transportation, geotechnics and building services, the engineers had been working in four or five "outmoded" buildings on Wellington Road.

"We felt that we would be able to work more collaboratively and more efficiently by moving to a new building all together," he explains. This would also be very much in line with the late Ove Arup's philosophy, as outlined in an address he made in 1970 to everyone who worked for the firm. In what became known as The Key Speech, he outlined his commitment to collaboration, quality work, "total architecture" and delivering the best service possible. Oddly enough, the Irish practice includes no architects - even though Arup Associates is a well-established practice in London.

Director Fergus Monaghan says it would be "commercially dangerous" to do that here, while Corcoran says Arup is "very comfortable" working with architects such as Murray O'Laoire and Scott Tallon Walker. Fitzgerald Kavanagh + Partners had already been engaged to design a six-storey office building and 80 apartments at 50 Ringsend Road by the developer, P Elliott and Co, and Arup was the structural engineer.

Realising that this was what they wanted all along, they did a deal with the developer to buy the office block outright.

The building was purchased "shell and core", and Fitzgerald Kavanagh were retained to do the fit-out, with Gerald Murphy as the director in charge.

"The key thing was that the staff were number one," he says. "Everything was underpinned by the requirement to create a good working environment in the context of environmental sustainability."

As Corcoran explains: "When we got the building, we engaged [ office space specialists] DEGW as consultants. Alison White came over from London and set up focus groups in the office. What came out of that process was that the staff very much like to work as teams, to transfer knowledge, exchange views and evolve designs."

So nobody has a cellular office, not even the directors. People work at bench desks, in groupings of six, and there's lots of space for collaborative work.

Meeting rooms are named after former Arup luminaries such as Jock Harbison, Frank Lydon and Morgan Sheehy - the structural engineer who designed the West Link bridge.

There are coffee points, a lounge area where drawings can be pinned up and discussed, a library on the first floor and a boardroom at penthouse level with panoramic views towards the mountains. There's also online access to Arup's skills network, enabling staff to get answers to questions from fellow engineers all over the world.

The new office, with an expansive double-height lobby floored in fossil-rich Kilkenny limestone, is claimed to be "the greenest building in Dublin".

It has a glazed triple skin to reduce solar gain by 100 per cent and natural ventilation rather than wasteful air-conditioning - a more sustainable approach which the firm is recommending to clients.

Fergus Monaghan describes the new building as "fifth generation" office space, in that the environmental agenda is really being taken on board.

"We'd be proud to give it a B rating, where A equates to zero emissions. More and more, the market is going to want this and the regulatory environment is going to insist on it," he says.

"We worked out that, broadly speaking, it was 10 to 15 per cent more expensive on the capital side, but we'll recoup that back from lower operating costs for the building management system. Even with higher oil prices, the energy for an office block still costs less than security does, but that won't be true in the longer term."

To encourage more take-up of energy-saving measures, Monaghan suggests that capital allowances should be extended to include active building façades that help to reduce consumption - an idea that could be taken up by Minister for the Environment John Gormley, the local TD, who's currently reviewing the Building Regulations.

Interestingly, there are only 16 car-parking spaces at basement level in the Arup building and many more spaces for bicycles, which are heavily used by staff.

Ove Arup's egalitarian philosophy also lives on because the firm he founded is held in trust for its staff, and can never be sold. A bit like The Irish Times, though not quite.