Quay Quarter Tower wins ACI’s Overall Excellence award

Located in the Central Business District of Sydney, Australia, Quay Quarter Tower is the world’s tallest adaptive reuse project. Adaptive reuse refers to a transformation of use from a building’s original purpose, while preserving its architectural and cultural heritage.

Built as the AMP Centre in 1976, the 45-year-old concrete building was repurposed from 2018 to 2021 with partial demolition and the addition of new elements— increasing its height, incorporating additional floorspace, and modernizing the tower's entire form and design.

The new upcycled tower is a 709ft (216m) tall building using a mixture of material solutions that extend service life until 2070, with Arup’s adaptive, retrofit design retaining 65% of the original building’s existing floorplates and structure and 98% of the original structural walls and core.

This equates to a saving of approximately 12,000 tonnes of embodied carbon.

Following its repurposing, Quay Quarter Tower sustainability credentials now include a Green Building Council of Australia 6 Star Green Star Office Design v3 accreditation for its novel environmental features which “optimise the existing building's embodied energy and resources.”

The design also boasts a 5.5 Star NABERS Office Base Building Energy Rating, a 4 Star NABERS Office Base Building Water Rating, and WELL Platinum certification. 

Additional projects recognized during the ACI Excellence in Concrete Construction Awards include:

Repair & Restoration

1st Place: Quay Quarter Tower, in New South Wales, Australia.
2nd Place: University of British Columbia MacLeod Engineering Building Renewal, Vancouver Campus, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Decorative Concrete

1st Place: North Bend Torguson Skatepark, in North Bend, WA, USA.
2nd Place: Block G-1, in Tampa, FL, USA.

Low-Rise Structures

1st Place: Bou You Rou, Sakai-shi, in Fukui, Japan.
2nd Place: Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad; Biomedical Engineering, Biotechnology, and Management Building, in Hyderabad, Telangana, India.

Mid-Rise Structures

1st Place: Centro Cívico Universitario – Bloque Rgd (University Civic Center), in Cundinamarca, Bogotá, Colombia.
2nd Place: University of California San Francisco Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building, in San Francisco, CA, USA.

High-Rise Structures

1st Place: Salesforce Tower Chicago, in Chicago, IL, USA
2nd Place: The Reed at Southbank, in Chicago, IL, USA.

Infrastructure

1st Place: I-74 Mississippi River Bridge, in Bettendorf, IA, USA
2nd Place: Sixth Street Viaduct Replacement Project, in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Flatwork

1st Place: Mountain Pass Lodge and Sliding Sports Facility, in Lake Placid, NY, USA
2nd Place: 11601 Wilshire, in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Honorable Mention: Bi-State Development Concrete Overlays, in St. Louis, MO, USA.

The winning project details can be found at ACIExcellence.org.