Healthy building syndrome

A company’s offices can speak volumes about its business personality. At Woodhatch in semi-rural Surrey, Canon’s new UK HQ is trying to hit the right notes. Roger East discovers why they are bursting with enthusiasm about the place.

When Canon UK commissioned its new headquarters, it wanted to reflect its ideal of kyosei, ‘living and working together for the common good’.

The brief was to combine innovation, empowerment and environment - business values that are also key brand values for Canon as a business technology provider. Four years on, the company has a state-of-the-art green office complex at Woodhatch, set in the parkland of an 18th-century country house near Reigate.

Managing Director Martin Laws believes this building puts Canon right where it intended on the map. It is both a physical landmark and, as he puts it, "a symbol that represents everything we believe in. There’s a relaxed atmosphere that encourages people to associate freely, to interact in ways that make their work both effective and enjoyable."

Canon has only been at Woodhatch since August, but it will be interesting to see what happens to staff turnover, usually a good indicator of morale. So what is it like? Well, it’s an unusual office structure. Interlinked new buildings form a group with the original Regency house, whose pale beige stone provides the colour theme. The main offices are arranged in open-plan wings, set on either side of natural rooflit atriums. For an organic feel, earth tones and natural materials are used throughout. Roofs are lined with timber (from renewable sources), the atriums have stone floors, and courtyards have landscaped water features and rock gardens. The 10-hectare landscaped park and arboretum, damaged in the storms of 1987, have been restored with extensive planting.

Designed by David Richmond and Partners, Woodhatch has been awarded the highest BREEAM rating for eco-efficient planning, design and construction. The array of 390 amorphous silicon solar panels on the roof (manufactured by Canon in Japan) is the UK’s largest installation of its kind, capable of generating 35kW of electricity.

Woodhatch accommodates around 500 staff in 10,500 square metres of offices. Canon’s business objective for building a new HQ was simple enough - to streamline communication by bringing all the company’s support functions under one roof. But it’s the human aspect that they are excited about. The casual dress code, the atrium coffee bar area for informal meetings, the provision of space for relaxation, the sense of openness...

Much of this is down to light and air. Naturally. Nobody works more than nine metres from a natural light source - which helps cut both energy usage, and costs. Artificial lights switch themselves off automatically when there is no one in the immediate area. Sunshades prevent summer sun beating down on south-facing windows, allowing in the daylight while minimising heat gain and glare. East and west facing windows are louvred to do a similar job on morning and evening sunlight. Fresh-air ventilation is maximised via a sophisticated building management system, which controls the opening and closing of high level windows, enabling the building structure to cool naturally at night.

Within the offices, modern working methods with an environmental slant include video conferencing to cut pointless travel, hot-desking facilities for visiting homeworkers and a clear desk policy that aids effective cleaning. Document management centres are located in dedicated work rooms on all floors, with special ventilation systems to take unnecessary heat away from the main personnel areas. While energy recovery is maximised, resource wastage is radically minimised. In its aim of reducing paper usage, Canon follows its own prescription. Much of the company’s existing paperwork has been transferred to Canon’s own electronic filing systems for archiving and retrieval. When printed pages do get disposed of, there is dedicated storage space to ensure that everything appropriate can be recycled.

We hear a lot about sick building syndrome. Canon could just be taking us in the opposite direction: a modern holistic approach that blends business objectives with the happiness and health of environment and employees alike.

Roger East is a writer on international affairs and environmental issues, and Briefings editor of Green Futures.

17 October 2001

Roger East