14 | LT McGuinness T T Kim Newth Accolades aplenty for trailblazing building The building won the Innovation Award at the 2025 Infrastructure New Zealand Building Nations Impact Awards REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT It was a proud milestone for Tauranga last year when the LT McGuinness construction team completed a trailblazing, eight-storey mass timber office building at 90 Devonport Road. The largest such building in New Zealand, it marks the start of an exciting new chapter in sustainable commercial construction. Tauranga City Council is the anchor tenant in Willis Bond’s future-focused building that has achieved a 6-Star Green Star Design rating and is targeting 5-Star NABERSNZ and WELL Gold. Not only is the low-carbon design winning attention, so too is the innovative approach that went into its development including use of prefabrication and adoption of an early collaborative approach that ensured on time, under-budget delivery. Last year, this notable building received the Innovation Award at the 2025 Infrastructure New Zealand Building Nations Impact Awards, as well as the Building Award at the 2025 SESOC – Structural Engineering Society New Zealand Awards. Adding to the accolades, LT McGuinness Project Manager James Haworth won the Chow:Hill Architects Outstanding Leadership Award at the 2025 Central Property People Awards along with other award nominations recognising his exceptional leadership on this project. Now LT McGuinness has been named as a finalist at the 2026 New Zealand Timber Design Awards for a Commercial & Industrial Building Design Award, recognising their key role in delivering New Zealand’s largest mass timber office building. These awards celebrate the best in New Zealand timber design and construction. This project showcases the considerable environmental benefits of timber in a commercial building and also demonstrates its usefulness in a context where ground conditions were weak and subject to liquefaction risk on the Te Papa Peninsula. In this instance, the mass timber structural system weighs around half of a comparable steel and concrete structure. Timber forms most of the primary structure, complemented with steel where needed to manage seismic forces. It’s an elegant hybrid solution that’s also resulted in a warm, inviting office environment, bringing 500 or more staff together in a single civic workplace. LT McGuinness worked alongside a core consultant team including architectural partner Warren and Mahoney, structural engineers Dunning Thornton and services engineers Beca. “We first became involved in 2021 at the concept stage to provide input on buildability and advice to achieve a simple structure that could be repeatable over eight floors,” says project manager James Haworth. “One of the keys to success in this project was that the timber suppliers — Red Stag Timber, Nelson Pine Industries and Techlam structural laminated timber products timber redefined ®
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