Tall & Urban News

The Sydney Greenland Centre in Sydney’s Central Business District has completed. The project has 68 floors and is 236.5 meters (776 feet) tall. Before this project began, the site contained the Water Sewerage and Drainage Board Building. Instead of demolishing the whole building, the project's architects, BVN and Woods Bagot, along with the structural engineer, ARUP, retained the orginal building's structure as a base and delivered a new cantilevered 40-story tower on top of it.

The floors that were formerly part of the Water Sewerage and Drainage Board Building were transformed into a Primus Hotel with 180 beds. The higher levels contain 479 apartments. The building also contains a 2,000-square-meter (22,000-square-foot) Creative Hub with space for dance, theatre, and visual arts over five floors. There are also two permanent artworks on the project’s façade and main foyer by New Mexico-based artist Larry Bell and Sydney-based artist Agatha Gothe-Snape.

One design challenge this project overcame was delivering natural ventilation to the upper residential levels in the tower. In tall building, typically, floors above the 20th story would rely on air conditioning for ventilation because the high winds at these heights make getting open air extremely difficult. The architects of this project designed angled panes that are suspended from clips that enables fresh air to enter the space while keeping the space protected. 

For more on this story, go to The Urban Developer.