CH2 Review: Elegant Simplicity Eats Complex Technology for Breakfast

Given the hullabaloo that surrounded the design of CH2 back in the green pioneering days of the mid ‘noughties’ it is tempting to experience a sense of engineering schadenfreude when reading Exergy’s report into the building’s performance six years down the track. To do so though would be misguided and do a disservice to the client and designers who had the vision and resolve to create a building that sought to push the boundaries of engineering practice.

Using a term borrowed from the car industry, CH2 can be considered a ‘concept building’. Just as concept cars are built to experiment and inform the design of the next generation of vehicles so this building has provided a showcase for the design of sustainable commercial buildings, some aspects of which have flourished in its wake and others of which have withered. It was always going to be thus.

The findings of the Exergy study bring to light a stark issue that engineers grapple with constantly – that of simplicity versus complexity. Again we might draw on a comparison with the car industry here. The cars we drive have gone down the complex technology route to arrive at a point where even the most basic of servicing is beyond the skill set of the owner. That works because volume of production has allowed systems to be fine-tuned to a point of high reliability and servicing is easily accessed. In building design we do not have the luxury of volume to hone solutions and we cannot simply drive our systems down to the service centre for attention. So the buildings we design need to be robust and assured in their operation. As City of Melbourne have discovered looking after a concept building is problematic for the owner and, more so even than normal, regular servicing and tuning is a pre-requisite for optimum performance.

Innovation in the construction industry is a challenging business and concept buildings are few and far between. Most projects in the office sector have a commercial imperative and innovation opportunities are hard to realise. It is evident that the most enduringly successful aspect of the CH2 design is the introduction of chilled beams which around the same time were implemented at 30 The Bond in Sydney and subsequently became the office standard for high end new office space. And the most notable characteristic of chilled beams is their simplicity.

CH2’s complex array of interwoven thermal systems cries out ‘trying too hard’. I can just imagine the designers sitting and pondering every possible interplay between systems that might theoretically eke out a few extra kilograms of carbon saving. In reality though it has turned into an all too familiar story with the complexities of the system having gone beyond the capability of the control system to achieve and maintain optimum performance over a sustained period of time (if indeed it ever did).

With the on-going attention and tuning that has been proposed I am sure that the performance of the building can be improved to a credible level. After all, despite the green ‘bling’, the fundamentals of what have been created are sound.

Whilst there are no doubt many learnings that can be taken from CH2 the over-riding lesson is clear; elegant simplicity eats complex technology for breakfast.

Tw: @andrewpettifer