Market Place 187 - Design Competition
DESIGN COMPETITION
MARKET PLACE 187 has been a point of interaction throughout its history, between Aboriginal peoples, between Chinatown/ Haymarket and Central, between university life and the life of the city. The opportunity is therefore to create an intersection of innovation on the site, a marketplace for ideas and transformative thinking. The cutting Edge!
Home to tech-orientated businesses, 187 Thomas Street’s identity will be distinguished by its environment promoting workplace collaboration, exemplary sustainable design and architecture expressive of and precisely anchored in the local climatic conditions and cultural setting of the site.
We have taken the above vision statement from the brief, as it encapsulates our approach to the proposition. Our aim is to produce a building which grows from the unique characteristics of its moment in time and context. More than a building the vision seeks a PLACE, a destination and a facilitator of human interaction.
Our proposed tower is a simple elegant extrusion taking its place in the skyline of Sydney as a distinctive and restrained form. Below the tower the podium is a rich and fine-grained series of brick buildings devised around a series of through site links and connections through to a central atrium where all uses come together. This vision is conceived as a marketplace of ideas.
The proposed through site link has been significantly expanded into a series of laneways all leading to a central space within the heart of the building. The Fine grain of the brick podium buildings allows for a variety of scales of occupation internally, all focused around two interconnected central volumes. One rising to the northern terrace and the other into the hotel.
Conceptually all building users enter and leave through the innovation hub connecting all users in a point of confluence.
The hotel begins at the podium roof with a reception and bar / restaurant floor above which the next 9 floors contain 218 rooms organised around a central atrium space. The simplicity and clarity in the hotel floors begin to describe the form of the tower which is organised as three forms, the northern form hovers above the podium roof terrace while the western form sits on the double height lobby form and the eastern form containing the core grounds itself along the laneway adjacent the “Sutton Forest Meat” building.