2016 National Architecture Awards: Commercial Architecture Award

Jury citation

A sophisticated and expertly resolved new commercial office building has used Sydney’s iconic 1916 “Money Box” as its base and embedded it into its program to repurpose the building and its historic interior spaces. Complex urban, heritage, structural, commercial and procurement imperatives are all addressed with apparent ease, resulting in a refined and proud new addition to Martin Place’s streetscape and Sydney’s skyline. The project has turned the constraints often associated with heritage buildings into a commercial asset through the provision of contemporary space, suitable for the twenty-first-century tenant, which also reveals, celebrates and reinterprets the original architecture.

The streetscape treatment reinforces the sandstone and trachyte street walls and recreates a linked sequence of accessible spaces, allowing access through the building at street level, supporting and reinforcing Sydney’s laneway renewal and making important contributions to the public realm. Innovative structural solutions have enabled the new tower to cantilever over the existing building and the original central light well has been reinstated as a light-filled atrium, providing natural light to the reconstructed laylight in the Banking Chamber. Through repurposing, redefining and extending the built fabric to create relevance for a new age, 5 Martin Place is an important benchmark for the conservation of Sydney’s history.