A mid-scale commercial building that reimagines the modern workplace. Positioned between North Sydney’s waterfront residential and the rapidly evolving CBD, Blue & William’s design celebrates its locale and spectacular Sydney Harbour views.
Driven by an emerging commercial district that sits in contrast to the surrounding characterful, residential streets, North Sydney is rich with complex considerations and opportunities – leafy streets and surrounding suburbs, spectacular harbour views, and a rapidly growing CBD that brings increasing amenity. Armed with deep insight into the rapidly changing urban landscape of the area we’ve conceived a innovative and healthy workplace building that redefines workplace lifestyle.
Blue & William is a mid-scale commercial building that will add diversity and an alternative, high quality commercial offer. With a focus on the incredible views across Sydney Harbour towards the city, the building design celebrates its unique location at the junction of the city and the leafy, characterful harbourside suburb to the south.
Setting it apart is the use of terracotta and brick that connect to the heritage of the area and give it a warmth and feeling of wellbeing rarely achieved in a commercial building.
Blue & William deliberately concentrates on elevating human experience. Building users will be greeted by rich landscape and materiality drawn from the public spaces on Blue Street and into the lobby and wellness garden. The wellness garden engages all users with nature as they arrive and depart from work and sets the tone for the highly integrated open air terraces that maximise the harbour views and are an extension of the workplace. The double height lobby compresses into a social zone which connects a café, third space, arrival and circulation into an activated and rich arrival experience.
Positioned at the intersection of the North Sydney city planning grid and the leafy harbourside suburbs of Lavender Bay and Blues Point to the south the building is wrapped in a expressed grid that references it’s city location and draws on the rich materiality of the leafy, red brick and terracotta roofed buildings that characterise the buildings to the south of the site. The grid expression of the façade also creates a pixelated form that erodes in response to planning controls, complex massing requirements of solar access, contextual shadowing and view impacts, like the erosion of the surrounding harbourside sandstone escarpments.
With vistas to Sydney’s iconic Harbour Bridge and the city skyline the terraces are a design features setting it apart from other commercial buildings. Integrated planters form a strong connection to landscape and place allowing users to work outside in fresh air on 50 percent of the building’s workplace floors.
The building’s materiality and detail are inspired by context and existing built form predominantly from the Art Deco period of architecture. Where the building interfaces with the public domain, a mixture of new and repurposed local bricks is featured with smoothed corner, return details. Above this masonry base a linear facade composition with fluted terracotta extrusions sets the building’s paradigmatic character. The location at the apogee of the Lavender Bay escarpment is what provides the building with those iconic views towards Sydney’s CBD while holdings its own in the ever evolving North Sydney skyline.
