The Atlassian co-founder made his fortune building collaborative software for offices. Next up: the collaborative office building.
It’s a week after his spat with Elon Musk over Tesla’s edict that staff must work at least 40 hours each week in the office, and Atlassian co- chief executive Scott Farquhar is sifting through job applications.that the news from the electric car maker “feels like something out of the 1950s. Very different approach to what we are taking at Atlassian, and here’s why”.
And not just any old building. The 75,000-square-metre, 40-storey tower that will rise above Sydney’s Central Station will be built with just half the embodied carbon – the carbon emitted during manufacture, construction, maintenance and eventual demolition – of a conventional equivalent. Atlassian, which employs 2700 people in Australia and 8000 globally, was early to the battle over the future of work when, back in August 2020, staff were told “they can choose whether they come into an office or not – full stop.” Since then, nearly half of the company’s hires worldwide live or work more than two hours away from one of its workplaces.
Most notable of all, it’s a real-time experiment in making the construction and operation of office towers less carbon intensive. Does all the energy he’s spending on the building detract from his ability to do his day job? Above that will be seven more mega floors, each supporting a four-level habitat, except for the very top habitat, which will comprise three levels and a plant room. This gives the building its sloping “crown”, cut away towards the south-east so asIt’s not just a new type of office, it’s a new type of building. At the urging of a guy who’s never built a building before, the company is forging ahead with a construction industry-disrupting approach to reducing emissions.
The PV cells will generate 5 per cent to 7 per cent of the all-electric building’s on-site power requirements. The solar cells are still a design work in progress. Wang points out louvres on a vertical facade are less efficient than rooftop panels, and shadowing from neighbouring buildings will reduce that further.
To meet its 50 per cent cut, Atlassian has created a virtual digital model of the same building built conventionally using post-tensioned reinforced concrete. “We’ve had that verified through a life-cycle assessment,” Wang says. “And so we are literally marking our own homework – keeping [ourselves] honest against that baseline.”So far the project is down to 55 per cent, without the use of offsets – credits purchased for emissions reductions made elsewhere.
“We haven’t said ‘let’s take a building and just roll forward and make the windows a bit better or a slight bit greener’,” Farquhar says. “We said, ‘hang on – blank slate, what do we want?’ It gives us a huge opportunity to rethink that. We’ve held the pen all the way from the design phase, all the way through to construction.”
Farquhar is clear that he wants Atlassian Central to raise the bar for other buildings that will follow in the NSW government’s plan to develop a tech employment-focused precinct around Central Station. Asked why it takes a construction industry outsider to shake things up, Farquhar invokes German physicist Max Planck to answer.
Atlassian has been clear that it is not seeking a commercial development return on the tower. Under its partnership arrangement, ASX-listed Dexus will debt-fund the $1.4 billion project cost and retain a 60 per cent to 65 per cent stake in the building. Atlassian will own the remaining 35 per cent to 40 per cent stake. It has also committed to a 15-year lease.
That’s the fate that has already befallen the St Mary Axe building in London, known as the Gherkin and built in 2003. It gave a new skyline to the British capital that symbolised a new-found dynamism. Now it’s all but disappeared behind less-noteworthy skyscrapers.
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