New Zealand Blood Service

We built a new three-storey building in the Hamilton CBD, with a basement car park, a state-of-the-art donor centre, offices, meeting rooms, a staff room and logistics facilities for the New Zealand Blood Service. The building features a striking three-dimensional curtain wall façade and a sloped entrance canopy.

The building footprint covers the entire section on corner site, requiring meticulous planning to minimise disruption to two busy arterial routes while maximising safety and efficiency. We opted to use articulated trucks to remove 5,500 cubic metres of fill while we were excavating the basement, which allowed them to enter from one side of the site and exit from the other without performing any complicated manoeuvres.

Despite the heavy steel frame required for the IL3 structure, we didn’t have room for a tower crane. We installed a mobile crane in the basement and split the structure into five zones, building zones one to four from the baseplate to the purlin. This ensured that only the final stage required traffic management.

The building incorporates many sustainable design features, including LED lighting, EV chargers, low-flow water fittings, a rooftop solar power array and stormwater retention tanks. We also prioritised sustainability throughout the build, repurposing 95% of the excavated fill and diverting 75% of the construction waste away from landfill, a particularly impressive result given the limited space for waste sorting on site.