Brookfield Place
Brookfield Place
Location: Sydney, Australia
Developer: Brookfield Properties
Designers: Make Architects, Architectus
Located in the heart of Sydney’s central business district, Brookfield Place Sydney is a 74,772 square metre mixed-use project that has reconfigured a prime location sitting atop one of Sydney’s busiest transit hubs. It comprises a new 27-storey, 6-Star Green Star office tower, two restored heritage buildings, a retail area, and an innovative new entrance for the local MTR station.
Various factors make this an exceptional project. From a conceptual point of view, the project’s centrepiece involved facilitating movement of people through the site via a grand entrance to the Wynard station transit hall on the new tower’s ground-floor. Given the space required, this created a design challenge of how to carry the new tower’s structural load while incorporating triple-height void. Following a global competition, a solution was found that uses a ground-breaking engineering approach, with the tower’s dead load suspended through mega-columns, while the shear load is distributed to the building’s exterior. In this way, the tower’s lift core appears to float above the concourse entry.
Another notable architectural aspect is the imaginative renovation of Shell House, a listed, 10-storey, art-deco sandstone building that adjoins the newly-built tower. The building’s façade had been fully restored, together with the 400-tonne clocktower. By merging the new structure with the old, designers have created seamless contiguous floor plates of a size (3,250 square metres) rarely found in the Sydney CBD.
Next, the project involved an exceptionally complex deal structure, originating as an unsolicited bid made by Brookfield to the New South Wales government that proposed the consolidation of land ownership of the site into a single development parcel. This is typically a tortuous process that doubtless involved long negotiations with various local government departments, and explains why the project took 10 years to complete.
For Brookfield, the investment rationale was an opportunity, on the one hand, to realise commercial value through rejuvenating a mix of tired buildings in the city centre, while on the other upgrading access and amenities of the city’s busiest but very dated subway station. As one juror observed, the endeavour sets a precedent that will hopefully be repeated: “It was admirable that it was not the government that had this wild dream to build all this, but a pragmatic investor who could see there was a big prize to be gained and was happy to take on the risk and persist with all the lobbying and work.”
From a community perspective, the project is important because the former connectivity from George Street to the station platforms consisted of a warren of pedestrian links that was no longer relevant to the requirements of modern-day Sydney. By effecting the upgrades, the CBD became immediately more accessible, not only for the business community occupying nearby buildings, but also for the city at large, given the need to foster use of public transport in the face of increasingly congested CBD roads.
In addition, the project has improved connectivity via neighbourhood laneways, in particular towards the west, where the CBD’s centre of gravity has shifted since the opening of the nearby Barangaroo area that fronts along Darling Harbour.