A striking new landmark building at Sydney’s King Street Wharf has been honoured at the 2009 Australian Engineering Excellence Awards in Canberra.
Arup, WSP Lincolne Scott and Brookfield Multiplex won one of five excellence awards for their work on the building at One Shelley Street, which features a magnificent external diagrid structure and imposing internal atrium. The 11-storey office block, designed by architect James Fitzpatrick, achieved a 6 Star Green Star Design rating from the Green Building Council of Australia, indicating world’s best practice in sustainability.
“The diagonal steel grid structural system – a steel frame running through and on the outside of the building – not only provides a powerful visual element, it eliminates the need for perimeter columns, maximising internal floor space,” said John Hewitt, Arup’s lead structural engineer for the project.
One of the main challenges was developing an effective fire safety strategy given that the atrium is linked at a number of levels by bridges, stairs and open floors.
“An open atrium was fundamental to the building design to ensure tenant connectivity, communication, natural light and natural ventilation,” said Marianne Foley, the project fire engineer and Arup’s office leader in Sydney. “This proved a challenge to the team as the Building Code of Australia is based on fire separation between floors to minimise fire and smoke spread throughout a building.”
Arup’s solution was a fire engineering strategy that aims to minimise fire size through the use of atrium smoke exhaust, drop down smoke curtains and complex computational fluid dynamics modelling. The structure is designed to survive a fully developed fire anywhere in the building with minimal damage. While the atrium was made to be as open as possible in the event of a fire, the smoke exhaust and drop-down smoke curtains will allow occupants to evacuate safely.
To meet world-leading ecological sustainability standards, One Shelley Street was designed to exceed the 5 star NABERS (National Australian Built Environment Rating System) benchmark by 40%. This provides the potential for the development to emit a very low level of greenhouse gas when compared to other buildings of comparable size and location.
The use of passive chilled beams with harbour heat rejection saves over six million litres of water and 2,013 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. This is equivalent to 2.4 full Olympic swimming pools of water and 50 average cars being taken off the road every year.