The team at Wardle is fascinated by the evolving ways that we all work – in the city, at home, and on the move. Our own office in Collingwood encapsulates many new working practices, with its variety of meeting spaces, communal work areas, café, art gallery, and productive rooftop garden. These provide a diversity in one’s daily environment by engaging the senses and the intellect. Together they make for a distinctive and meaningful sense of place, an environment in which work feels like a natural fit.

As a city becomes more dense, its sites for development inevitably become more complex. Often our projects must negotiate sun access planes, rail tunnel corridors, heritage fabric, services infrastructure, or prescribed planning envelopes. We apply our combined ingenuity to create buildings that emerge from their constraints and complexity to be innovative and extraordinary.

Beyond the commercial imperatives of efficiency and yield, a workplace can reveal something of its inner workings to the street and the city – it can have a civic generosity. A positive demeanour to the public realm makes for an inviting address to the world beyond. We invest civic qualities in our commercial buildings.

The ground is where a commercial workplace meets the city surrounding it. This is where the first impression is made upon a visitor as they arrive, orient themselves and experience the outer edges of the workplace above. We always create buildings that celebrate activity at the ground level.

The experience of the occupant is critical to the success of an office floor plate, in partnership with efficiency. Flexibility is important to allow a workplace to adapt to future work practices as they evolve. A diversity of workplace experience is also necessary – a range of spaces to rove between including communal, social, individual, interactive, reflective and creative. We design for flexibility and diversity – all within a highly efficient framework.

A city has a history. A new building must be sensitive to its context, understand its place in time and forge a contemporary way forward. New stories can evolve from old stories. We create buildings that fit into the ongoing lineage of the city.