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Sunday, December 29, 2024

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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 The outdated 1970s structure had come to the end of its lifespan, and the tower’s owners wanted to replace it with something bigger, better and more energy-efficient.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.”