Unity Place: Swindon's most sustainable office

Designing the city’s most sustainable office

When Zurich Insurance committed £39m to a new six-storey headquarters in Swindon, the brief was clear: build the most sustainable office the city has ever seen.

Designed by Alec French Architects with Skanska as main contractor, Unity Place runs entirely on renewable electricity. Cycling facilities, energy-efficient lighting, a rooftop beehive, furniture made partly from recovered ocean plastics. Nothing was chosen without a reason.

The target was BREEAM Excellent, a certification that would place Unity Place in the top ten percent of non-residential buildings in the UK for sustainability. Every material in the building, including the acoustic ceiling, had to contribute.

A minimal interior with no acoustic plan.

Alec French Architects designed the interior around a minimal industrial aesthetic: full-height window walls, exposed hard surfaces and a limited colour palette throughout. It gives the building a strong visual character, but glass, concrete and hard wall finishes reflect sound rather than absorbing it.

In a busy open plan office, that means reverberation builds quickly, conversations carry across the floor, and background noise makes it harder to concentrate.

Across six floors of open offices, stairways, restrooms and a multi-storey atrium, each space needed an acoustic solution suited to its specific use, within budget, within the design language, and contributing credits toward the BREEAM certification.

With 3,800m² to cover and six very different types of space to address, getting the specification right across every floor was the real challenge.