Overview:
Located in Bonifacio Global City (BGC), One World Place represents a standard for innovative design inManila’s booming financial district. Over the last ten years, Philippines economy has grown dramatically, positioning itself as one of the strongest in the South East Asia region, and is now expected to be one of the largest global economies over the coming decade. Bonifacio Global City, with its evolving skyline, is representative of this growth.
Completed in late 2015, One World Place’s success is essential in repositioning the Daiichi Properties as a modern and inspiring new developer in the Manila market, basing their core values on lasting client relationships and continuously providing value to generations of future business leaders, thus supporting Philippines growth.
Design Concept:
Once the site of a United States Army base, several attempts at creating a comprehensive master plan for the Bonifacio Global City area resulted in a unique overlay of orthogonal and round circulation grids. This arrangement created challenging geometric configurations, with small and often times irregular individual parcels, for future development.
Blending form to function, One World Place stands at 143.50 meters tall, contributing to the city’s already compelling skyline. Rooted with four levels of basement parking and six levels of podium parking, the 32-story tower features ground floor retail space, 22 levels of office space, a penthouse level, executive offices and a mechanical deck floor. The building’s mixed-use components accommodate a wide range of tenant activities, including retail banking, spaces for small businesses, cafés, and corporate work spaces. The majority of tenants are service-outsourcing oriented, as BPO and KPO service types occuping single floors at the lower building portion. Corporate offices occupy the upper part of the building. The facade is fully covered in a unitized curtain wall.
The tower was planned on a 1,790 square meters site, with a floor plate of about 1,100 square meters, an offset core and the total gross floor area is 49,374 square meters. Efficiently fitting a building program within such a relatively small floor space posed a significant challenge.
One World Place has been certified as LEED Gold. The design team integrated multiple high-performance building design concepts—including daylighting, natural ventilation, and highly efficient insulated glass with solar-reflective coating, a high-glazing ratio and glass visible light transmittance, and exterior and interior shading devices. Additionally, efficient Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) mechanical systems, onsite rainwater collection, and gray water use was also incorporated into the design of the building. This level of sustainability will help mitigate the region’s unique climatic and economic challenges, providing natural ventilation in a typhoon-dominated area, while creating high-energy efficiency in Manila, a city with some of the highest electric rates in Asia.
High Performance Strategies:
A design innovation unique to One World Place was the integration of “monsoon windows” into the tower’s high-performance curtain wall facade.
The monsoon windows originated from a desire to leverage certain elements of the Philippines tropical climate. Every monsoon season (November through March), temperatures drop to 24-26 degrees Celsius (75-78 Fahrenheit), prompting office buildings to open their windows as much as possible. Unfortunately this season also brings extensive rain to the region, and the heavy winds which accompany the rain make keeping office windows open a nearly unfeasible. Certain historical buildings in Southeast Asia addressed this problem by integrating special openings over horizontal projected ledges on the building’s side, which allow cool air into the building while preventing rain water infiltration. For One World Place, the design team, the client and the curtain wall contractor were able to work together to engineer a series of openings protected by rain covers into the building’s double-glazed skin. Using the vernacular architecture style, the openings integrated well with the look of the building while retaining functionality. With this function, One World Place will be one of the first commercial office building in Southeast Asia to feature this concept for natural ventilation.
Other design elements that leverage climate characteristics include exterior façade screens, derived from the vernacular bamboo façade screens found on residential dwellings throughout most of the Philippines islands. These aluminum screens are combined with vertical aluminum fins, and are featured on the southwest and northeast facades. This allows for substantial solar heat reduction and fixed solar glare control, for both direct and diffused light. At the lower parking floors, levels three through seven, similar screens provide visual cover for the fresh air openings. For maintenance purposes, screens are developed as removable façade elements.
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