Quay Quarter Tower.

ACCESS FOR THE BEST TALL BUILDING IN THE WORLD!

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.

PROJECT

Quay Quarter Tower is a world-first innovation. With high ambitions from the outset, it is a blueprint for environmentally responsible architecture. Rather than demolish and rebuild, it underwent upcycling, retaining 60% of its core structure. The tower's innovative expansion, enhancements, and recycling resulted in a new facade, improved services, and a much larger floor plate size.

The building blends campus-style intimacy with high-rise verticality, featuring four landscaped sky terraces, a podium garden, a multi-mode terrace, and one acre of green space and a landscaped rooftop terrace along with complex facade surfaces, sunshades and recesses. As a result, the Architectural building has many twisted layers, angles, and no free roof space. The BMU needed to compress below the facade and be complementary to the refurbishment of the old building to a new, much larger and much more architecturally complex sustainable high-rise. There was only the tiniest of parking spaces allowed for a BMU, and the BMU itself had to be retractable to maintain a clean skyline as required by the Sydney CBD area architectural regulations. 

ROLE

Farra delivered two disappearing BMUs with telescopic moving counterweights mounted on different levels. Our innovative opening hatch system seamlessly integrates into the architecture and compliments the smooth operation of the BMU reveal. Farra designed a linkage-type system. This was similar to some of the former solutions Farra has designed and manufactured for other buildings, but none have been delivered for such a tight space with such a small parking size. We implemented a launcher ram to allow the BMU to squat down into the compact garage whilst still being able raising to the required height. A lightweight solution for glass facade replacement was required so that users can gain access to under-hung glazing replacement scenarios. A standard straddle link weighs 800 kg whereas our engineers came up with a solution that delivered the same result at a mass of 70-80kg, one 10th of the weight!

RESULTS

We are proud to have one of our access machines on the 2023 winner of the (CTBUH) Best Tall Building Worldwide. (Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats) and the building has achieved 6 Star Greenstar Office Design V3 and targeting 5.5 Star NABERS energy rating.