As a thermal buffer, the entire envelope of the new Spark building in central Christchurch has been designed as a twin-skin, glass façade from Thermosash. The glass has been frosted, fritted and decorated with a digitalised, pixelated diamond pattern that emulates that of the Christ Church Cathedral’s rooftop a few metres away. The idea being that Spark’s telecommunications business works in a similar way: “you take a piece of reality and you digitise and pixelate it,” says Jasper van der Lingen, director at Sheppard & Rout Architects, “which we thought serves the purpose of reflecting the context. Then the facets, the diagonals all have colour-changing LED lights.”

The interior furthers this idea of representing data flows through a series of dramatically curved balustrades, which “flow from one area to the other and pull the lines on the interior and the viewer’s eye around, making it feel like it’s one big, dynamic space,” says the architect. And dramatic it is. This high atrium – inspired in part by the telco’s Auckland and Wellington offices – and its corresponding, central staircase, ebbs and flows, curved at points like a DNA spiral, at others, like a ribbon that leads to a beautifully crafted, maple and beech staircase on the upper levels of the atrium.