205 NORTH QUAY
Brisbane, Australia
CLIENT Cbus
PROGRAM Class A high-rise office building, with premium services (“end-of-trip” amenities, auditorium, meeting rooms, gym, outdoor swimming pool, roof terrace), restaurant, retail, and below-grade parking
AREA 73,000 m2 (786,000 sf)
SUSTAINABILITY 6 Star ‘Green Star,’ 5.5 Star NABERS Energy, 4 Star NABERS Water
COST US$457 million
STATUS Invited competition, first prize 2019; completed 2025
ARCHITECTS Hassell, REX, Richards & Spence
PERSONNEL Dylan Bachar, Xuancheng Zhu, Maur Dessauvage, Nazli Ergani, Matan Gal, Álvaro Gómez-Sellés Fernández, Britt Johnson, Nicolas Lee, Araceli López, Michael Paraszczak, Jarod Poenisch, Joshua Ramus, Raúl Rodríguez García (PL), Emma Silverblatt, Alfonso Simelio Jurado, Elina Spruza Chizmar, Yuxuan Tu, Teng Xing
CONSULTANTS Acoustic Logic, Altitude Facade, Arcadia, Arup, Bennett & Bennett, BG&E, Certis, Cundall Johnson & Partner, Currie & Brown, Ellis Air, EMF, Front, Graphis, Griffiths, GTA, JHA, Magnusson Klemencic, Multiplex, Rider Levett Bucknall, RWDI, TTM, Urbis, WSP
CONTRACTOR Hutchinson
205 North Quay asserts its commercial value not by willful form, but by shrink-wrapping a slender, highly efficient structure in an equally efficient, state-of-the-art enclosure tailored to Brisbane’s subtropical climate.
The aggregated plots constituting the building’s site form an ‘L’ shape, which—after required setbacks are applied—generates a northwestern leg too small to organize the building’s main mass.
205 North Quay, therefore, adopts a pure 74 m x 26 m extruded form. Its side core, placed midway along the northwestern edge of its rectangular plan, creates a large, contiguous office floorplate—column-free through the heart of the building—that takes advantage of southern views of the Brisbane River and South Bank’s cultural district. Its asymmetrical position also provides shading from Brisbane’s harsh northwest sun and maximizes usable area at the retail and lobby levels along its southeast street frontage.
At grade, the tower forms a protected plaza off Herschel Street, a cocoon flanked by inward-facing retail on both sides. The plaza features bold in-ground planting designed to accommodate a variety of activities, from markets to exhibitions to performances. The northeastern bank of retail continues through the building along the lane, reinforcing the pedestrian connection to the Roma Street Station. Entries to parking and loading are off Herschel Street and North Quay, respectively, to minimize negative impact on pedestrian flows.
Above the plaza, a sky lobby and a civically scaled 210-seat auditorium for public forums and cultural events serve as points of interaction between visitors and the tower’s tenants. A wellness floor—featuring a full gymnasium and a 25 m outdoor swimming pool—one floor higher above, buffers the office floors from the plaza’s and sky lobby’s public activities.
To comply with a regulatory maximum façade length of 40 m, 205 North Quay’s 73 m-long southeastern façade is split by a vertical zipper of office balconies. Every second and third balcony is set back to allow a Tristaniopsis Laurina (a native Queensland tree) enough space to flourish.
A remarkable triple-height roof terrace with an oculus in its lid is inserted at the tower’s top, with direct views down the Brisbane River’s southwestern stretch and to Mount Coot-Tha.
Maximizing efficiency, views, and light penetration, the entire edifice is wrapped in a conventional silicone-glazed curtain wall on a standard 1.5 m module, whose color-neutral double-glazing has a highly transparent Visual Light Transmission (VLT) of 0.62.
To enable the façade’s high glazing ratio and VLT, and excellent interior lighting and color rendition, the building’s long northwest and southeast faces are veiled in a copper-anodized, rolled-aluminum sunscreen composed of large ovals. The shorter southwest and northeast elevations are adorned with copper-anodized, extruded aluminum vertical fins.
The ovals’ rolled shading surface leverages geometric rigidity to use less material than conventional fins and overhangs while also blocking more solar heat gain. The design requires only one component, which is then bi-axially mirrored to complete each tube. The pitch of the oval cuts is optimized for solar exposure on each façade orientation with minimal projection depth.
The shading performance of the tailored ovals is comparable to that of a fully glazed design using heavily tinted glass or a low window-to-wall ratio design. The ovals block more direct solar gain from the critical north and west orientations than conventional triangular or rectangular shading overhangs and fins, and solar transmission is reduced by 63% as compared to an unshaded curtain wall.
