The Customer Service Centre opened up on the ground floor at 10am on Tuesday– giving the citizens of Aberdeen the chance to visit the building for the first time since the near-completion of the three-year project to restore and transform the historic structure into the City Council's main base.
Some two-thirds of the world's second largest granite building has been leased from the University of Aberdeen for 175 years for just £4.7million to create the new offices.
The transformation of the historic building, which has involved 565,000 man-hours of work, has been completed on schedule and under budget. The original budget was set in 2006 at £80.4million but now looks likely to involve capital expenditure of around £65million.
Contractors Safedem began the demolition and façade-retention work in summer 2008, followed by Sir Robert McAlpine in summer 2009 who were charged with the rebuild within the impressive 105-year-old granite façade to create 174,000sq ft of modern, open-plan, efficient and sustainable office space. The pale high-quality Kemnay granite facade was restored to its original glory by scrubbing off 100 years of grime to leave the building looking much as it would have done when it was opened by King Edward V11 on 27 Sept 1906.
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The ornate, wood-panelled former Senate Room – renamed the Grant Room in memory of former University Court member Sheena Grant – has been retained in its original state and will become a popular wedding venue, accommodating up to 60 people and offering easy access to the impressive setting of the Quadrangle for post-ceremony photographs.
Citizens and visitors to the city will also have open access to the Quadrangle during working hours and the space will be used for events for up to 2,000 people.
The building has been officially rated "excellent" for its environmental sustainability, with a biomass boiler providing a quarter of its heating, the widespread use of natural light, and the 'smart' lighting system which senses movement and switches on in response. The building also features cycle racks, changing rooms and showers in the lower ground floor to encourage staff to use sustainable forms of transport to work – and Marischal College could be linked up in future to the City Council's energy-efficient district heat and power system.
City Council Leader Councillor John Stewart, who chairs the Marischal College Project Board, said: "I am proud and delighted to say that the project has been a huge success. I and my fellow councillors kept an extremely tight grip on the finances from day one and we are now able to say that it has been completed bang on time and well under the original budget.
"A huge team of people worked hard as a productive partnership on the scheme – councillors, our own staff, architects, demolition crews, the construction company, civil and structural engineers, building services engineers, quantity surveyors and project managers.
"What we have collectively achieved is the completion of one of the most exciting construction projects in the whole of the UK and a civic building in which the people of Aberdeen can take enormous pride."
The A-listed Marischal College, designed by A Marshall Mackenzie and Archibald Simpson, is of national significance. The renowned frontage was completed in 1906 at the height of the Aberdeen granite industry but lay vacant and neglected after the University of Aberdeen quit the building in the 1990s.
Several private sector schemes were mooted over the following years but failed to proceed. Aberdeen City Council approved the lease of the building from the university in 2005 to create a new corporate headquarters after it emerged that the proposed conversion was the most cost-effective solution to modernise the council's accommodation.
(GK)
