SAP Galway is a contact centre for a German software company with 360 staff located on a business park to the east of Galway, on an exposed site elevated from the surrounding landscape. The staff are from a variety of nationalities and deal with technical queries from around the western hemisphere according to time zones and languages. The typical building occupancy is from 7 am to 1 am (18 hours) with teams working in 3 shifts. The building is designed to create a balanced environment for employee comfort and working using the minimum amount of energy from non-renewable resources. Environmentally, this is a high-density occupancy building with high ventilation demand and high cooling load. Free cooling using outside air is the only cooling source utilised and an atrium separates office floor-plates, which are connected via bridge structures. The unheated atrium between the blocks provides a ventilation lung for the building, allowing stale air from the office wings to exhaust regardless of the wind direction. The structure of the atrium is a latticework of kerto beams with a standard 63mm wide plywood member cut into 900mm deep beams to suppor the single glazed roof. The herringbone arrangement of the lattice ensures that the offices either side of the atrium are always in shade as the sun moves around the buildingThe building is built as two blocks either side of the landscaped single glazed atrium. The shallow office ‘bars’ (13 metres) are orientated on the north-south axis to prevent thermal insulation through the long façades. Workspaces are on the floor-plates and relaxing zones are on the bridges.The implementation of a standard precast concrete flooring system within a simple concrete frame ensured swift construction of the primary structure and a thermally massive medium for cooling the building during the summer months. The facades are either cedar clad insulated timber panels to the north and south gables or to the esat/west hand crafted hardwood windows, untreated, with external cedar brise soleil for thermal control with louvred air intake units incorporating both a manual ventilation panel and a specially designed heat recovery unit to ensure constant temperature fresh air intake to the office space.
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