Andre Koolen

Director

Sectors

Residential

Tourism & Hospitality

Office & Workplace

Services

Management

Delivery

Andre started out on a building site and worked out early that he “did better with a pencil than a hammer”, as he puts it. That took him from the site into a Bachelor of Architecture, and then to New York, where he spent several years on the delivery teams for major office projects at Hudson Yards and the World Trade Center.

He returned to Auckland to lead the work he is now known for, the tall, complex buildings that reshape a skyline, and has become RCP’s resident tall-building specialist. He led the delivery of Commercial Bay and its 39-storey PwC Tower, took charge of the One Queen Street redevelopment and its InterContinental hotel, and is now project director on the Downtown West waterfront redevelopment.

Our industry is built on complex contractual arrangements and being able to translate that into simple terms is a skill. The amount of ambiguity in our industry is significant and for me it’s important to take steps to translate and remove the ambiguity to make the right decisions.

Andre Koolen Director

What marks him out on work like this is the ability to make complexity legible. A high-rise development arrives tangled in design, procurement, commercial agreements and long lists of stakeholders, and Andre’s real skill is turning that tangle into a clear direction a client and team can follow. He talks about navigating the grey, the ambiguity woven through the industry’s contracts and drawings, and the discipline of removing it before it becomes a problem.

He also leads RCP’s technology and innovation work, and he is convincing on it because he treats digital as a way to deliver better rather than a talking point. Digital execution plans, structured project data and model-based design coordination are, in his hands, more ways of stripping ambiguity out of a project.

Deloitte Centre

Commercial Bay

Downtown Development