Case Study - Dundee Council Civic Offices

Client - Dundee City Council
Architect - Reiach and Hall
Completed - 2011
Size - 12,500 sq m
Cost - £34m

Dundee Council’s Civic Office building, Dundee House, opened in 2011, replacing a much-maligned Sixties’ tower block. It’s very much an administrative centre, a base for 1,000 staff, but its ground floor is given over to the public, with offices for the payment of Council Tax and spaces where citizens can meet councillors. And Edinburgh-based practice Reiach and Hall was keen to give it a strong, civic presence. One of the main challenges in its design was integrating an existing DC Thomson print hall from 1910. This was achieved by incorporating core office and meeting space into the historic building while creating a circulation spine and seven-storey void, clearly articulating the relationship between old and new. The old print hall’s red brick exterior now forms one side of an elegant light-well.

Galleries and bridges cross the void, providing access to new-build offices organised in three west-facing blocks. In this way daylight floods into the building’s core while the concrete structure and brick piers give a sense of enclosure. The concrete structure is clad in slender, pale Danish bricks (from Petersen), with thin, flush, white mortar joints, in a tribute to Denmark’s most famous modernist architect Arne Jacobsen, while the facade composition borrows from the rigorous geometries of Jacobsen’s contemporary, Italy’s Giuseppe Terragni. A component of the brief was to increase inter-departmental interaction, so all communal facilities are located outside departments. Featuring natural ventilation and exposed thermal mass, the building achieved a BREEAM Excellent rating. In 2012, it won a slew of awards, including an RIBA and an RIAS award, as well as British Construction Industry Awards Building Project of the Year.