One Central Park,Sydney

Driving into the city takes me past One Central Park, the mega complex that is being built on the old brewery site. It’s opposite the UTS building which has deservedly topped the lists year after year as the ugliest building in Sydney. 

The problem with driving in and out of the city is that it doesn’t let you look upwards, a fact that I realised last week when I was stopped at lights outside the Central Park development.  On this occasion I was able to look upwards and was surprised to see vegetation growing on the side of the building  

This prompted me to do some research about the new building and here are some of the things I found out:

• The development is known as Central Park, being located near Central Station and not far from the city centre, plus it contains a number of parks. It is a mixed use urban renewal project. 

• The development consists of 3 stages: 

Stage One comprises a new tower called One Central Park, designed by international architect Jean Nouvel. It is the tallest building on site and features “vertical gardens”, LED art, a cantilevered section and heliostat (discussed below). 

The second and third stages are called Park Lane and The Mark. They are residential buildings and are located adjacent to the new parkland. 

• The site covers an area of 5.8 hectares and is being developed by Frasers Property Australia. It will be a mix of apartments for 2,500 residents, offices, shops, restaurants and open spaces. 

Some models and drawings:

• The old Carlton and United Brewery is being retained for adaptive reuse.  This includes retention of the old chimney and nearby buildings and retention of the heritage brewery gates.

• The main building will have a cantilever attached which will extend 42 metres from Once Central Park’s East tower. Attached to that cantilever will be a heliostat structure. A heliostat (from helios, the Greek word for sun, and stat, as in stationary) is a device that includes a mirror which turns so as to keep reflecting sunlight toward a predetermined target, compensating for the sun's apparent motions in the sky. In other words, it’s like the Death Star but instead of destroying planets, it distributes the sunlight evenly into the retail atrium and park below. The cantilever will have the heliostat reflector framework affixed to its underside, with a skygarden terrace above for recreation and outdoor dining for the exclusive use of residents of ‘Sky at One Central Park’. There will also be a plunge pool. 

      

• The 110 tonne steel frame for the cantilever was lifted into place at the beginning of February. The world’s strongest tower crane, the FAVCO M2480, nicknamed ‘Tinkerbell’, which can lift a maximum weight of 330 tonnes, lifted the reflector frame 100 metres to the 29th level of the tower fronting Broadway. 

• 320 large mirrored panels are now to be fitted to the reflector frame, each mirror being fitted with nine LED coloured lights. At night, the heliostat’s 2880 LED lights will illuminate the towers. The lighting installation is one of the large-scale permanent artworks that comprise Central Park’s $8 million public art collection. 

• The vertical gardens at One Central Park, the world’s tallest vertical garden, will comprise a ‘living tapestry of plants, flowers and vines’ that changes colour and form with the seasons. According to the designer Patrick Blanc "The building, together with my vertical garden, will be an architectural work floating in the air, with plants growing on the walls – it will create a very special result that will be very new to Sydney.”