205 NORTH QUAY
Brisbane, Australia
AWARDS Australian Institute of Architects Queensland, Queensland Architecture Medallion, 2026; Australian Institute of Architects Queensland, The Beatrice Hutton Award for Commercial Architecture, 2026; Australian Institute of Architects Queensland, Art & Architecture Prize, 2026
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, efficient structure in an equally resourceful, state-of-the-art enclosure tailored to Brisbane’s subtropical climate.
The site, formed by aggregating several plots into an ‘L’ shape, leaves a northwestern leg too small—once setbacks are applied—to organize any portion of the building’s main mass reasonably.
205 North Quay therefore adopts a pure 74 m x 26 m extruded rectangular form. A side core, placed midway along the northwestern edge, leaves a large, column-free floorplate at the building’s heart, opening south toward the Brisbane River and South Bank’s cultural district. This off-center core position also shades the office floorplates from Brisbane’s harsh northwest sun and frees up more usable retail and lobby space along the southeast street frontage.
At grade, the tower forms a protected plaza off Herschel Street, flanked by inward-facing retail on both sides. Bold, in-ground planting anchors the plaza, which is designed to host markets, exhibitions, and performances. The northeastern retail bank continues along the lane through the building, reinforcing the pedestrian connection to Roma Street Station. Parking entry is off Herschel Street, and loading is off North Quay, minimizing impact on pedestrian flow.
Above the plaza, a sky lobby and a civically scaled 210-seat auditorium for public forums and cultural events give visitors and tenants a shared point of interaction. One floor up, a wellness floor—with a full gymnasium and a 25 m outdoor pool—buffers the office floors from the public activity below.
To comply with a 40 m regulatory maximum on façade length, the 74 m southeastern façade is broken by a vertical zipper of office balconies. Every second and third balcony is set back to give a Tristaniopsis laurina—a native Queensland tree—room to flourish.
A triple-height, covered roof terrace with an oculus tops the tower, offering direct views down the Brisbane River’s southwestern stretch to Mount Coot-tha.
To maximize efficiency, views, and daylight, the building is wrapped in a conventional silicone-glazed curtain wall on a standard 1.5 m module. Its 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 to deliver excellent interior lighting and color rendition—the building is clad in copper-anodized aluminum sunshading: a rolled-aluminum sunscreen of large ellipses veils the long northwest and southeast faces, while extruded aluminum fins clad the shorter southwest and northeast elevations.
The ellipses’ rolled shading surfaces leverage geometric rigidity to use less material than conventional fins and overhangs while also blocking more solar heat gain. Each is formed from a single component, bi-axially mirrored. The pitch of its leading surface is optimized for solar exposure by façade orientation, with minimal projection depth.
The tailored ellipses’ shading performance matches that of a fully glazed design with heavily tinted glass or a low window-to-wall ratio. They block more direct solar gain than conventional triangular or rectangular overhangs and fins, cutting solar transmission by 63% compared to an unshaded curtain wall.
