One Shelley Street

Firm
  • ,
  • Client Unnamed Company,
  • size 330,000 sqft
  • Year 2009
  • Location Sydney, Australia,
  • Industry Financial / Investments,
  • Clive Wilkinson Architects designed a new office design in Sydney, Australia for Macquerie.

    Macquarie’s expansion in Sydney led to the need to accommodate 3,000 people in a new building. We were attracted by the challenge of working with a forward-thinking bank. Our design approach was to open up the 10-story, 330,000 SF building vertically and activate the Atrium to showcase a transparent workplace. The client’s decision to embrace Activity Based Working (ABW), a flexible platform for the financial business, developed by Dutch consultants, Veldhoen + Company, called for mobile environments.

    Working in synchronicity with Woods Bagot, as executive architect, and Fitzpatrick + Partners, as architect for the base building, we were able to create a kind of vertical Greek village of the future. Each floor was divided into 5 neighborhoods of approximately 100 people. Within the office floors, we designed Plazas with themes based on ancient collaboration typologies: the dining table, the library, the garden, the tree house, the playroom, and the coffee house. The innovative steel diagrid structure of the exterior was extended internally by our graphic collbaborator, Christian Daniels of EGG Office, to create a unified building identity.

    The building exceeds the highest levels of Green Star or LEED efficiency, benefiting from radical technologies like harbor water cooling, chilled beams and zone controlled lighting. A large percentage of furniture was adapted and re-used from their previous space, but most significantly, ABW working allows a huge saving in resource efficiency, real estate and operating costs.

    DesignClive Wilkinson Architects
    Photography: Shannon McGrath