The trick with choosing the right space for a low energy fitout is to find one that either doesn’t need much changed, or one that that you can justify changing without a guilty conscience. Bligh Voller Nield (BVN) found just such a space for engineering firm Lincolne Scott. All they had to do was remove the ceiling. Originally a 1930’s department store, it had a generous floor-to-floor height and no intruding central lift core. Also, it could fit Lincolne Scott’s entire Melbourne office in one single floor. An aging suspended ceiling partly obscured tall, steel framed windows. Luckily, the ceiling was in disrepair, so doing away with it was an easy decision – phew! Removing the ceiling also exposed all the services, in one deft stroke expressing one of this organisation’s driving principles.

Lincolne Scott’s Group Director, Che Wall, a renowned ESD advocate and chair of the World Green Building Council, was a key figure in ensuring that Lincolne Scott’s Melbourne office fitout became a flagship of environmental sustainability. When designing a sustainable fitout, you have to remember to reuse and recycle, and to keep the design minimal. Anything you do, anything draw up and want made, requires energy. The latest iteration of this old building is a de-clothing (how better to radically transform the space with the least energy and green hose gas emissions than to remove its lining?) and has a kind of campsite feel. New insertions appear as temporary structures, waiting for their turn to be removed, after which the old space will be interpreted afresh.

BVN asked the Lincolne Scott employees where they felt comfortable, and the local pub and being out in nature frequently came up. A low-key, informal atmosphere akin to a local now manifests in a poolroom-cum-café area. Evoking the feeling of being out in nature is a far more interesting interior design challenge. Looking at the fitout, nature is certainly not the first thing you would think of as having been a design inspiration for the space. Hold this idea in your head and look around … um… is it a forest? BVN’s response was to vary the furniture and styling throughout, rather than to seek a uniform suite of details and colours. Light fittings vary, old chairs from the previous office have been re-used, and old timber storage shelves are arranged in new configurations. Not all the furniture is second hand, though; some recycled timber tables were designed by BVN. It takes time to source suitable recycled stuff, and interior fitouts frequently have fast-paces design timelines.

None of these strategies came as close to recreating the feeling of nature as did the simple act of removing the ceiling tiles and revealing the odd, old in situ concrete and crude steel structure of the department store, with its suspended network of ducts and conduits. Two large beams set at an angle to the grid of columns, the remnants of an old escalator opening, add to the chaos. The ceiling is crusty. It is lumpy, unruly and strange. Imagine you are sitting at your desk, pondering the solution to an engineering design problem while gazing at the ceiling – your eyes will find a multitude of nooks and crannies, unusual shapes and rough textures, the closest thing in this man-made space to organic complexity. The ceiling and most of the existing columns have been painted white, helping to spread light through the deep plan. Perhaps it is a kind of forest, with white rectangular trunks disappearing into a white-on-white canopy of beams, pies and conduits.

The success of the project is in its treatment of the existing space as an open field. It stays open; the ceiling runs over head uninterrupted. The inserted elements – little ponds and modules that colonize the old department store – have their own ceiling, colour and identity. They never reach up to full height, but maintain a datum more or less the level of old ceiling, indicated by the air conditioning diffusers that now stop in midair.

Behind the reception desk is a modernist glass pavilion of meeting rooms. Raised up on a false floor that provides displacement air conditioning, this box pushes up to nudge the pipe-work above. A decorative privacy screen of recycled metal is painted brilliant red, an industrial remnant sourced from laser cutting steel. Circular offcuts stuck to an adjacent wall form a field of rusty steel polka dots.

A central built element, linked by continuous black band that runs from the ceiling to floor and back again, contains the games room and café, located at the intersection of movement paths across the office floor. The black ribbon, including print rooms and storage areas, ties various functions together. It is a visual ordering system that has nothing to do with the relationship between the functions themselves. It unifies and aligns this group of new walls into a discrete element, another module in the filed.

No element in this fitout looks more temporary and ready for deconstruction than does the yellow painted scaffolding used as a visual marker of a team zone, a sketch in the air above some tables and chairs. Literally a scaffold for supporting ideas, magnetic whiteboards hang from the frame and make the activities of the different engineering teams visible to the rest of the office.

Scaffolding is ready-made, cheap and recyclable. Designing for sustainability leads us to contemplate the future of our creations, makes us do the least, act the simplest, and reduce the amount of energy consumed in churn, the rapid turnover of commercial space into ever new iterations. Aesthetics, decoration – how can we justify the expense anymore, unless we can reuse some by-product of an industrial process, or salvage something destined for landfill?

Finally, there’s the shipping container, beached at a rakish angle as if it just fell off an ocean freighter and floated in. it is the first thing you see when exit the lift, its bright yellow contrasting starkly with the blue Lincolne Scott electric bicycle parked next to it. It isn’t a real shipping container, but meeting rooms detailed to look like one. Why? For fun? It eloquently exemplifies the design strategy. “We are bringing stuff into an empty space,” it says, “and we can take it out again.” It was designed with its future and ours in mind.