Merit award for Holmes’ fire engineering strategy for Invercargill Central at the 2024 ACE Awards.
Invercargill Central was envisioned as a cohesive, masterplanned precinct involving the redevelopment of an entire city block. The centre includes curated retail, hospitality, entertainment, and commercial zones, connected by new and existing pedestrian links.
Working in close partnership with the client and wider project team, Holmes developed a unique approach to fire engineering strategy for Building Code compliance, provided fire protection and passive fire design input, as well as monitored and guided the implementation. We developed a Fire Engineering Strategy that utilised existing elements, modernised and improved the overall fire approach—while opening the path for future expansion.
At the heart of the design philosophy was the need for design and construction to be sequenced to enable greatest utilisation of the site, and the most efficient programme. We also incorporated risk mitigations for future Certificate of Public Use (CPU) into the base building consent design, leading the project team and consenting authority through the design and approval process for stages and sequential opening, before undertaking physical building works onsite to enable CPU occupation.
In the process, we minimised the extent of fire separations, allowed for significant permutations of occupant load arrangements, integrated both existing and new separate buildings, and delivered site related observations in a new format that specifically identified areas for remediation via a Holmes customised site reporting tool.
In total, we achieved a total of 6 building consents, and 3 main CPU’s, with approximately 8 sub CPU’S to allow the central city to progressively re-open.
