Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Aurecon 2 gets five-star Green Star rating to future-proof its status
THE SECOND office block at Century City for global engineering company Aurecon has been awarded a five-star Green Star Office v1 design rating by the Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA).
The 3 300m² building has been built next to Aurecon’s original 7 000m² premises, the first office building in South Africa to receive a five- star Green Star rating.
Aurecon was responsible for the design of all the engineering services of the project and also the Green Star rating application, with assistance from Ludwig Design Consulting. Developed by the Rabie Property Group for listed property development and investment group, Ingenuity Property Investments, Aurecon 2 brings to 10 the number of Green Star rated buildings at Century City and to six the number that have achieved five-star Green Star ratings.
The other buildings
to achieve five stars are Bridge Park East and West, which were also developed by Rabie Property Group, and No 17 Park Lane which houses the Auditor- General and which was developed by Asset Matrix. The sixth five-star rated building is Chevron.
All the other Green Star rated buildings at Century City have achieved four stars. They include the Business Centre and No 3 Bridgeways (home to Philip Morris) – both developed by the Rabie Property Group and both of which have achieved four-star ratings in the design and as-built categories. Ibis House in The Estuaries Office Park, which was developed by Horizon Capital, and Estuaries Plaza, which was developed by Asset Matrix, have both also achieved fourstar Green Star ratings, the former in the design category and the later in the as-built category.
In a similar vein, the Stan- dard Bank branch in Canal Walk Shopping Centre also recently achieved a four-star Green Star Interiors v1 as-built rating.
A number of other applications for Green Star ratings are still pending including that of the Century City Urban Square which has been developed by Rabie at a cost of R1 billion and which includes a conference centre, a 125-room hotel, offices, apartments and restaurants in five buildings fronting onto a public square. This development is registered with the GBCSA as a pilot project for a new mixed-use rating tool.
Rabie director, Colin Anderson, says the developer’s vision is to have the biggest concentration of green buildings in one precinct and this it is attempting to do in the conference centre precinct which is home to the buildings around the Square as well as Chevron, Bridge Park, No 3 Bridgeways and the Business Centre.