Thursday, January 6

On our way back from Rotorua, Dr. Forgey had a speaking engagement at a conference in Hamilton. While he was giving his speech, the rest of the group went to the Hamilton Gardens. It is in the top seven largest publicly owned gardens in the world. The main focus of our visit was to the Productive Garden Collection. This area focused on plant that either produced edible fruits and vegetables or were used in day-to-day life for a farmer (compost piles, worm farms, etc.). While we were walking through this section, people were working in the gardens tilling the soil and trimming the plants, such as would be done as if it were in their back yard.  Due to the lack of time available, we weren’t able to explore much of the other areas of the garden.

When we arrived back in Auckland, we met up with Sara Ballantyne (Cooper Companies) and Terry Buchan (Hawkins Construction) to do a site visit through Cooper Companies new Britomart development. This phase of the project consists of three buildings on 5 hectacres of land across the street from the Auckland harbor. The east building was built on top of an existing train station, so the architects and structural engineers had to be real careful about the loading they could place above the station. Sara also mentioned that when the train stations were constructed, concrete columns were pre-installed for the Britomart building that was to go over top of it, which created an additional constraint for the new buildings. The site is also adjacent to the main bus hub for the entire city of Auckland. The three buildings are planned to have first floor retail with commercial space above that. It was originally intended to have the top three floors of the east and west building as residential penthouses, starting at $3M+, but after the economy crashed, they decided to convert that space to commercial as well. The two prime tenants for the two main towers are Earnst and Young in the East 1 building, and Westpac Bank in the East 2 building. Overall, the commercial space is 100% pre-leased and the retail is 70% pre-leased. The overall budget for the building is about $210,000,000 and has a total of about 40,000 m² (which is about 400,000 sf²). The project is slated for completion in March 2011.

Of the three buildings, only one building has the available space to utilized rainwater harvesting systems. Much to our disappointment, there wasn’t much further discussion about the sustainable aspects of the projects (except for the close proximity to all the public transportation systems).