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World’s first ‘upcycled’ skyscraper saves Australian tower from demolition

Once Sydney’s tallest building, the AMP Centre was showing its age. The out­dated 1970s struc­ture had come to the end of its lifespan, and the tower’s owners wanted to replace it with something bigger, better and more energy-efficient. But demolishing high-rises comes with significant environmental costs, from con­struc­tion waste to the CO2 emitted by heavy machin­ery. So in 2014, Australian invest­ment firm AMP Capital launched an architectural competition with an unprecedented brief: To build a new skyscraper without demol­ish­ing the old one.

Dubbed the world’s first “upcycled” high-rise, the resulting tower opened earlier this year and, on Friday, was named World Building of the Year 2022. Standing at 676 feet tall, the vastly expanded 49-story skyscraper, now known as Quay Quarter Tower, retained more than two-thirds of the old struc­ture, including beams and columns, as well as 95% of the original building’s core. “The tower was coming to the end of the end of its life, in terms of viability… but the structure and the ‘bones’ can actually last a lot longer,” said Fred Holt, a partner at the Danish architecture firm behind the design, 3XN, in a video interview. “You can’t always retain everything. But if you can retain the structure — and that’s where the majority of your embodied carbon is — then you’re lowering your footprint.”