Sydney skyscraper Quay Quarter Tower named world’s best building
Quay Quarter Tower, located at 50 Bridge Street, is part of the transformational Quay Quarter Sydney development.
An ‘upcycled’ 1970s office block in the Sydney CBD has been named as the world’s best building.
Quay Quarter Tower – the new AMP Building – at 50 Bridge Street, Sydney has been awarded The Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival in Lisbon, Portugal.
The building’s five stacked ‘shifting volumes’ were what impressed the judges most.
That approach was conceived by Danish firm 3XN and was first used for the new 37-storey Finsbury Ave Square tower at Broadgate in London.
The stunning building.
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Those on the WAF judging panel were won over by how the “vertical village”, managed to “create a sense of community” and how and the series of stacked atriums allowed “exceptional views, while also allowing daylight deep into each floor”.
“The winner was commissioned to provide a building on a world-class site, and to retain a huge proportion of an existing 50-year-old commercial tower,” WAF program director Paul Finch said.
“The result was an excellent example of adaptive reuse.
“An excellent example of adaptive reuse.”
The upcycled tower at ground level.
“It has an excellent carbon story, and it is an example of anticipatory workspace design produced pre-Covid, which nevertheless has provided healthy and attractive space for post-pandemic users.
“The client was prepared to risk building out an idea on a speculative basis – it worked.”
The 206m high Quay Quarter Tower managed to keep two-thirds of the earlier building’s initial foundations and 95 per cent of its internal walls, in an incredible feat of architecture and engineering.
Finsbury Ave Broadgate. Picture: 3XN
“The 206-meter, 49 story Quay Quarter Tower (QQT) is a once-in-a-generation project,” 3XN wrote on their website.
“Located on the edge of Sydney’s bustling Circular Quay, the tower “upcycles” the existing AMP Centre tower.
“Built only in 1976, the original AMP Centre was reaching the end of its usable lifespan, but rather than simply tear it down and start over, the project team set out to reach an ambitious goal: to reuse as much of the existing building and set a lofty new standard for what is possible for adaptive reuse in architecture.”
A once-in-a-generation project.
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