The Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, the Frank Gehry designed Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, has been recognised as the best building of the year at the 2016 Australian Engineering Excellence Awards.
The unique structure, which progressed after winning the Buildings & Structures category at last month’s Sydney awards, had also been recognised as the best overall project in NSW, receiving the coveted Bradfield Award. This recent award continues an impressive run of recognitions.
“It’s a cliché, but there truly is nothing like this building. To look at it, you can understand why it required not only the full range of our skills, but also complete collaboration across all of the design disciplines. To achieve such a complex form, we had to coordinate every individual piece. It really is a testament to everyone involved that this building has been recognised amongst the finest in the country. Peter Macdonald, Project Director, Arup
The Dr Chau Chak Wing Building has been continually credited for its unique and irregular form, a hallmark immediately observable through its two distinctive façades.
These elements, although complex, are only an outward expression of the entire building. Conceived as a system, each component is finely tuned and balanced in a shared context, and each essential in the structural success of the building. This logic is a physical representation of the educational ‘organism’ that Frank Gehry used to describe the project and the philosophy of learning it embodies.
Judges were particularly impressed with the approach and the building’s final form crediting it as a ‘step outside the box’, and a highly difficult concept to realise.
A leading application of BIM was essential in achieving this careful coordination. Throughout the design stage, the model was used extensively for design development and coordination across each disciplinary team, spread across cities around the world. This approach greatly increased the efficiency of the design process.