By Julie Power
It wasn’t your ordinary reno. But the risks involved in upcycling an existing 1970s office block paid off for architects behind Sydney’s new Quay Quarter Towers, who last weekend won the World Building of the Year, the second major international award in less than a month.
The 206-metre-high building at 50 Bridge Street in Sydney’s CBD, which was developed by AMP Capital, also won the award for the world’s best skyscraper in late November.
Designed by Danish architects 3XN with BVN architects in Sydney, Quay Quarter Towers was announced world building of the year at the annual world architecture festival in Lisbon last Friday which attracted nearly 800 entries across a range of categories.
The shortlist of 252 completed buildings included diverse projects, ranging from homes to museums around the world.
These included the much celebrated NSW project, the Bundanon Art Museum and Bridge by Kerstin Thompson Architect that has won Australia’s highest architecture prizes; the Victorian Pride Centre by BAU GAA Brearley Architects and Urbanists and Grant Amon Architects in Melbourne.
Overseas buildings on the list include Paddington Elizabeth Line Station in London; the Edge Suedkreuz Berlin, a seven-storey office complex that is the largest freestanding hybrid timber building in Germany; and a new style Chinese mall by DUStudio in Shanghai that used art works to create a theme of lost in time.
Among the shortlisted projects was a home built for a Thai man who “desperately loves” dogs designed by EKAR architects. The client wanted to build a place for him and his dogs to “share his happiness and his beloved dogs’ happiness” with a place where other dogs could visit.
The festival’s program director Paul Finch said Sydney’s Quay Quarter Towers was an excellent example of adaptive reuse. “It has an excellent carbon story ... The client was prepared to risk building out an idea on a speculative basis – it worked.”
Two-thirds of the beams, columns and floor slabs and 95 per cent of the original core built for the AMP Society in the 1970s were retained.
Dan Cruddace, senior practice director with BVN, said adaptive re-use – small scale or radical – offered real potential for sustainable and regenerative change. “Upcycling the original tower has not been the easiest route, but it’s certainly a smart way to go. Smarter for the planet because it’s saved around 7.3 million kilograms of carbon. That’s equal to 35,000 flights Sydney to Melbourne.”
It was also a smarter financial decision because repurposing buildings rather than knocking them down to rebuild meant a faster return to market.
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