The Best Tall Building in the World

Sydney can now claim the honour of having the “Best Tall Building in the World”. One Central Park has taken out the coveted title gifted by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Chicago, USA.

So Why?

The council’s executive director and competition juror Antony Wood said of the winning work: “ Seeing this project for the first time stopped me dead. One Central Park strongly points the way forward, not only for an essential naturalisation of our built environment, but for a new aesthetic for our cities – an aesthetic entirely appropriate to the environmental challenges of our age”.

The building’s key features include hanging gardens, a cantilevered heliostat, an internal water recycling plant and low-carbon Tri Generation power plant. One Central Park has been awarded a five star by the Green Building Council Australia. The French landscape artist Patrick Blanc was commissioned to design the 1,120 sqm of vertical gardens that cover the surface of the building. 35,000 plants and 383 different species were used, including some natives such as acacias. The gardens use a remote controlled, dripper irrigation system and a special process developed by Blanc in which the roots of a plant are attached to a mesh-covered felt, soaked with mineralised water. This allows the plants to grow without soil along the face of a wall.

There are so many features of this building that are remarkable, I personally love the vertical gardens the most. I’ve terrified Anon by ordering the book byPatrick Blanc and a have started planning our own internal vertical garden. We’ll see.

And Central Park is only half finished. There are more shops, offices and apartments to come. In Kensington Street, the entire street is being made into a pedestrian lane with cool bars, boutique 5-star hotels, flower shops and hatted restaurants…….bringing new levels of interest to the suburb of Chippendale.