The ongoing redevelopment, Sydney’s largest urban renewal project since the 2000 Olympics, unites the CBD with the waterfront, provides a new financial services hub, and will create a vibrant new carbon neutral district in the downtown area. The project was developed by Lend Lease.
The building of International Towers Sydney has been the driving force behind the Barangaroo project. Conceived as three sibling buildings, harmonious but with distinct details providing individual character, the towers are carefully positioned on a radial geometry to maximise sunlight and views. Opening out over the western harbour, they now mark Sydney’s new front door.
The towers’ design turns convention on its head, creating a workplace for the future. 23,000 office workers will be housed in approximately 300,000m2 of premium office space across the three towers. The flexible 2,500m2 floorplates will enable occupants, who already include Gilbert + Tobin, HSBC, KPMG, Lendlease, Marsh & McLennan, PWC, Servcorp, Swiss-Re and Westpac to personalisze and arrange their office spaces according to their unique needs. Day-lit lift lobbies, panoramic prows, 100% fresh air, high ceilings and large open vertical spaces throughout the buildings all combine to promote a state of the art workplace.
The unconventional lobbies are transparent and inviting, weaving into Barangaroo South’s tight network of streets and lanes, enriching the development, adding a new dimension to Sydney’s outdoor culture, and helping to give the towers human scale and impact at ground level. The facades are functional as well as elegant, utilizing a combination of horizontal and vertical shading to protect from solar load, reducing the energy needed for cooling, whilst also providing a unique color, scale, filigree and grain to the individual towers.
The towers have received the prestigious 6 star Green Star rating, and along with the shading utilize a wide spectrum of environmental features including harbor water heat rejection, solar panels, rainwater capture and recycling, blackwater treatment, and a basement housing three times more bicycles than cars.
Sculpted from site, context and country, the precinct is of its place. The radial arrangement of the towers break the orthodox Cartesian grid, the radial arrangement exploits views of the city and water, maximizing solar access. The resulting street pattern and its proportions provide a human scale public domain enriched by an intelligent mix of activity, which is strongly connected to the CBD.
There are innovative measures to meet the enlightened sustainability agenda. The tower floorplates are shaped to correlate with the optimized solar shading, and provide democratic flexible spaces for the progressive user organizations to make their mark in creating agile and dynamic workplaces and communities of the 21st century in global Sydney. The requirement for each of the towers to have an individual, low energy façade which could be read as a cohesive whole gave us the opportunity to develop and formulate three external façade systems which responded to their unique location. The façades used detailed, filigree solar shading to create a cohesive whole across the precinct and provide legibility from city to human scale.
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