Quay Quarter Tower

Quay Quarter Tower, located close to Sydney Opera House, eschews the conventions of a traditional, commercial high-rise and instead is arranged as a vertical village formed of community clusters that encourage interaction to activate the spaces and bring the building to life.

The radical sustainability strategy for the building involved upcycling the existing tower, retaining 65% of the previous tower’s beams, columns and slabs, and over 95% of its existing core, resulting in an embodied carbon saving of over 7,500 metric tons in concrete alone. The design adds approximately 45,000 square metres of new construction, primarily on the north side of the building by grafting on new floorplates to the existing slabs. The 206-metre tower comprises five shifting volumes stacked on top of each other. Each volume is arranged around a central atrium that accommodates shared amenities and social spaces, encouraging people to connect and interact over multiple floors. The rotation of the volumes also optimises the changing views as the building rises, with lower volumes turning away from the adjacent building to face the active streetscapes of the surrounding neighbourhood, and higher floors twisting towards the world-famous panorama of the harbour, opera house and botanical gardens. A new podium adds community value to the neighbourhood by providing retail space and a publicly accessible roof garden that invites casual get-togethers and offers an unexpected retreat in a busy urban district, and helping to revitalise and attract people to this previously overlooked neighbourhood.