Location: Sydney, Australia.

Architect: fjmt.

The proposed development comprises a 32-storey mixed-use development, including repurposing existing vehicular access and basement levels for shared car parking and services, conservation, refurbishment and fit out of the existing 10-storey heritage building for retail and commercial office uses, construction of a 22-storey tower above the heritage item, communal facilities and building plant at podium level and 101 residential apartments. The concept is based on a series of ideas and principles that embody the opportunities within an integrated and holistic vision. The five key conceptual principles are integration and dialectic, suspension, identity, heritage and materiality. The new architecture is conceived as a suspended object, floating in space as a light, suspended curvilinear object that both contrasts and compliments the heritage form below.

It is open, inclusive and ambiguous in identity and character, with a unifying warm horizontal grain of louvre creating a quiet and unified surface of shading and privacy. The suspended form will give strength and unity of specific urban identity to the multiple uses of shopping, workplace and residence. The tower form is curved with varying radii with the largest radii on the corner of Market and Castlereagh Street. It adjusts vertically with the floor plate progressively reducing in size as the tower meets the heritage podium and similarly towards the top of the tower. It is positioned above the new centrally located void within the heritage building, creating a cradle for the tower and a meeting and integration of the two where the tower form is visible through all levels of the heritage podium floors. Three key Heritage considerations have been analysed to determine a design outcome that is sympathetic but creates a new interpretation.