One Angel Square, Manchester

Compiled by Pari Syal 
Photography: Daniel Hopkinson; courtesy Satellite MPR

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Designed by 3DReid, The Co-operative Group’new head office in Manchester has been declared the most environmentally-friendly building in the world.

The Co-operative Group’s new £110 million low-energy, highly sustainable head office is, at 500,000sq.ft, the largest commercial office building in Manchester. It is the highest scoring BREEAM 'Outstanding' (Rating 95.32%) building in the UK, and sets a new national benchmark in sustainable design within the commercial sector.

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Sustainability is embedded as an integral part of the architecture and engineering here: the objective of the design being to create a building that is adaptable and flexible in its operation, highly efficient in the consumption of resources, and economically viable and replicable. 

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Consequently, 328,000 sq ft of high quality office space is specifically designed for maximum flexibilty that facilitates reorganisation and reallocation, without excessive refit costs. Ground breaking engineering features include a double-skinned façade to minimise heating and cooling throughout the year and underground concrete earth tubes that provide free heating and cooling for incoming fresh air.

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The thermal mass of concrete is employed again within the building by exposing 300,000sq ft of concrete that forms the ceilings to the office floors.  The concrete acts as a thermal sponge, passively soaking up heat and reducing the amount of energy needed to cool the building.  Waste air is finally extracted over the balcony edge using the natural stack effect of the atrium thus negating the need for large space-hungry extract risers within the cores.   Before being expelled at the highest point of the roof, the air passes through a heat-exchanger that recyles the heat to warm the incoming air into the offices below.

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3DReid incorporated a recycling system for used water and a rainwater harvesting system to guarantee low water consumption. The Co-operative’s local sourcing and sustainability principles are put into practice in using rape seed from British Co-operative farms to produce fuel for the building’s CHP power plant.  Excess energy can be supplied back to the grid and utilised by the wider NOMA development, with waste energy being sent through an absorption chiller, used to cool the building.

  

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The architects have addressed the issue of global warming and future-proofed the building against predicted weather data for 2050. So the building can cope with a potential 3-5 degree increase in summer temperature and 30% more rainfall in winter.  The building’s fabric and environmental systems have been designed to become more efficient as average annual temperatures rise.

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Other areas of innovation are the implementation of electrical pool car charging points, fed from the low carbon CHP and the development of a building user ‘App’, which relays real time user information on how the building is performing.

The public-realm area in front of the head office has also been designed with sustainability and green credentials in mind. With its energy strategy based on the application of a ‘clear energy hierarchy’, the building is highly innovative and sustainable and packed with ground-breaking environmental and carbon reduction technology.