Commissioned to design a new high-performance office facility for the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) in Riyadh, Omrania envisioned a modern campus in which workforce productivity is balanced with enhanced occupant health, quality of life, and sustainable building technologies. The proposed SEC headquarters goes beyond the function of a traditional white-collar office building, laying the foundation for long-term employee satisfaction and positioning the company as a leader in innovative planning as well as energy-efficient construction.
In designing the headquarters, Omrania first identified that a social, economic, environmental, and cultural program was vital to the success of SEC today and in the future. It was important that the company’s home reflect its evolving priorities. The building’s conception, as well as its anticipated economic service life of 100 years, represents a visionary leap on the part of SEC and Omrania, and may come to represent a new architectural benchmark for Saudi Arabia in its commitment to sustainable design and engineering.
PROGRAM AND PLANNING
The headquarters are seated in a state-of-the-art campus, with offices and amenities distributed across five interconnected buildings and the surrounding “wadi” garden landscape comprising one city block. The four cube-shaped office blocks are unified by a central podium volume at the center, which serves as the main reception and creates a social and functional heart for the company. The individual buildings house different departments and, viewed together, represent a coherent unity of organized parts. At the same time, the plan enables a great deal of flexibility to accommodate future growth and change.
From the project’s outset, Omrania sought to gain an in-depth understanding of how SEC was organized in order to optimize its floorplates. Part of the optimization included an understanding of different use scenarios and how the company’s operational principles might evolve over time. The result is the use of open-plan floorplates, which offer highly efficient, flexible, and easily adaptable work environments. Each office building has a horseshoe-shaped floorplate surrounding a multifloor atrium, which serves as a social hub and filters indirect natural light throughout the interiors. The top floor of each building provides more conventionally cellular accommodation for senior executives and a handful of international consultants.
The central podium building is the key programmatic element of the project. This dynamic, active space houses a variety of shared functions including an auditorium, an exhibition space, a prayer hall, and a media center that fill the campus with life. In addition, the central podium building boasts an extensive academic center—a state-of-the-art learning environment where employees at every level are provided the means to maintain their knowledge base and further develop their skills. The academic center is tucked below ground level, while the other shared spaces are contained within a series of visually distinct pavilions, enlivening the site through visual juxtaposition and contrasting forms, and offering easy connection with the outdoors in certain seasons. The roof of the podium offers shaded and landscaped recreation space for employee use. The four office buildings can also operate independently of the central podium if need be; each has its own entrance and atrium that can be selectively opened or closed to allow greater flexibility and autonomy.
HEALTH AND AMENITIES
The SEC campus is designed to increase the quality of life of the people who work there, simultaneously fostering employee satisfaction and productivity. The site has multiple social spaces that encourage both self-care between work hours and interaction among employees from different departments. A staff amenity building and health center, adjoining the central podium, houses a dining hall, gym, swimming pool, and health clinic. There is also a generous, comfortable lounge with an executive club–like atmosphere in which employees can host visiting guests or take a break.
Landscape is designed in a way that encourages healthy lifestyle choices including walking and jogging paths that complement the interior health and fitness facilities. The atria, podium, and academic center provide convenient access to a series of deeply shaded, environmentally tempered, semiprivate spaces positioned between the podium and office buildings. These open-air spaces offer the possibility of learning in an outdoor environment at certain times of the year, or simply taking a stroll in the morning or evening.
At the material level, the building itself is literally healthy: its finishes are low- or zero-VOC, formaldehyde-free, and toxin-free to avoid the documented problem of “sick-building syndrome,” in which the interior has a negative affect on employee health and absenteeism. A “green cleaning” policy ensures that cleaning contractors will be prohibited from using materials and chemicals that are known to cause health issues. Furthermore, building services systems such as ventilation and air conditioning are designed to international best-practice standards, reducing any risks associated with poor air quality.
ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE
All systems serving the facility are engineered for efficient performance. The building envelope itself is designed to achieve high thermal resistance values via glazing and shading devices, reducing the impact of the cooling load on energy demand. The atrium in each office block is designed to harvest ambient light, distributing it across the floors and thereby lowering the need for electrical light sources during the day.
The roofs of the four office buildings are equipped with photovoltaic and wet-solar arrays that generate a combined 1.2 megawatts of electricity—among the largest rooftop arrays in the world, though still significantly short of the anticipated full occupant power load. Well before the sun reaches its zenith each day, the cooling system’s glycol is pre-chilled using an off-peak ice-making plant, further reducing energy costs and consumption. Designated parking for fuel-efficient and electric vehicles is desirably and visibly placed, while the required parking for up to 4,000 conventional private vehicles is set underground to reduce heat gain.
Water efficiency was also a priority, as it must be for any major building in Riyadh today. Graywater from washbasins and ablutions is treated and stored in the adjacent service facility. This water is then used to irrigate and maintain the seasonal, climate-specific landscape elements without tapping into the municipal supply.
In order to minimize the carbon footprint inherent in importing building materials from distant countries, Omrania conceived the project in a way that maximizes the extraction and production of these materials from Saudi sources. To further the twin aims of sustainability and education, Omrania suggested that during construction, SEC facilitate apprenticeships to enable young Saudi workers and professionals to learn emerging specialized technical trades and management techniques, to support the growth of a viable domestic green building industry. In this way, the SEC headquarters is intended to have rippling economic and environmental effects beyond its own physical reality.
CONCLUSION
From conception and design to building technology and material specification, the SEC headquarters demonstrates a forward-thinking understanding of the architecture of the modern office environment. By promoting health and cultural sustainability as well as functional efficiency and reliability, the project separates itself from traditional office architecture and contributes to a new generation of user-friendly and environmentally sophisticated architecture in Saudi Arabia, joining an international dialogue regarding health and sustainability in the workplace.
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