Quay Quarter Tower (QQT) in Sydney, Australia has been declared the World Building of the Year 2022 at the fifteenth annual World Architecture Festival (WAF), held in Lisbon.
It was announced amongst other ultimate accolades including World Interior of the Year, Future Project of the Year and Landscape of the Year, at a glittering gala dinner held at the Convento Do Beato, a former Portuguese convent dating back to the 16th century, located in a historic part of Lisbon.
The World Building of the Year, supported by GROHE went to Quay Quarter Tower (QQT), designed by 3XN Architects.
The 206-metre tower, located close to the Sydney Opera House, is an office building arranged as a vertical village, creating a sense of community and providing spaces that focus on collaboration, health, well-being and external terraces.
Constructed of five stacked shifting volumes, 3XN employed a radical sustainability strategy which involved upcycling the existing tower. The series of stacked atria create a social spine with exceptional views, while also allowing daylight deep into each floor.
Paul Finch, Programme Director of the World Architecture Festival commented: “The winner was commissioned to provide a building on a world class site, and to retain a huge proportion of an existing fifty-year-old commercial tower. The result was an excellent example of adaptive re-use. It has an excellent carbon story, and it is an example of anticipatory workspace design produced pre-COVID which nevertheless has provided healthy and attractive space for post-pandemic users. The client was prepared to risk building out an idea on a speculative basis – it worked”.
