Bates Smart has won a City of Sydney Design Excellence Competition for a new residential tower at 130 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, beating Kann Finch and Luigi Rosselli architects to win the brief.

Situated at the intersection of Elizabeth and Liverpool Streets, and overlooking Sydney’s Hyde Park to the North, the tower will rise for 36 storeys in a series of six stacked boxes that are tied to a vertical spine on the building’s eastern side.

Bates Smart have said that if approved the building will comprise 148 residential apartments while Enstruct—the structural engineers who contributed to the design—have also noted there will be an additional eight basement car parking levels below ground floor.

A noticeable design feature is the fretwork façade that Bates Smart director Philip Vivian says references the nearby Hyde Park and works well with the adjacent Mark Foy’s building.

“Our concept appears as a “stack” of humanely scaled buildings that recall the historic context of Hyde Park while resolving the stepped and angled complexity of the approved envelope,” he explained.

“The palette of natural materials proposed sits comfortably within the series of nearby buildings such as St James station and the Australian museum.”

The design has now been submitted for a Stage 2 Development Application. 

Images: The Two Artisians


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Other contenders for the 130 Elizabeth brief were Kann Finch architects (image below from website) and Luigi Rosselli architects (image above from website)