Unloved Buildings Untapped Opportunity in Australia’s Cost Crunch

In the years since the Danish architecture studio 3XN entered the Australian market with the landmark Quay Quarter Tower, it’s earned plenty of plaudits. The 54-storey project re-envisioned the 1976 AMP Tower, retaining almost all of its core and saving 12,000 metric tonnes of embodied emissions—and racked up seven wins at the 2023 Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat awards . Another major adaptive re-use project in the Sydney CBD is soon to be announced, with potentially a larger scope and greater impact than the Quay Quarter Tower. Skyline-defining projects such as the roof of the Sydney Fish Market have also followed, with plenty more in the pipeline (including the Gold Coast Arena— 3XN was this week announced as part of the preferred design consortium ). Now with a decade of local practice under its belt, and in its 40th year globally, the firm is launching an Australian office for sustainability research and consultancy operations under its sister company GXN. Internationally, GXN has worked on such projects as the masterplan and two towers of the ZUDO project in Amsterdam ( pictured at top ), while the team has remotely collaborated on 3XN projects in Australia. ▲ The 3XN GXN team have led masterplanning and design on the mixed-use ZUDO precinct (the former ABN AMRO HQ) in Amsterdam. GXN associate Karolina Bäckman Faulkner told The Urban Developer that the scope of work began with circular design and environmental design, but “is now moving to also cover behavioural design”. “So focusing on user experience, wellbeing, inclusivity. Designing for different needs and different experiences overall,” Bäckman Faulkner says. “I think the interesting thing is that we’re not only architects; the team is everything from anthropologists to people who studied architectural psychology. “We have sustainability engineers. We have material scientists. We’ve had PhD students who work for NASA, researching behavioral design in space. And so we try to pull on a lot of angles to really capture a holistic approach to sustainability. ▲ The redevelopment of the Riverside Theatres at Parramatta will emphasise circularity, user experience and behaviour. “Being able to design low-carbon buildings also relates to understanding the behavioral aspects of that, balancing environmental performance with user experience.” On a project level, that looks something like the 3XN and GXN work on the Fish Market (in collaboration with BVN, who also worked on Quay Quarter Tower). That project required “understanding the behavioral aspects of designing a marketplace and how it ties into the public space, but also the logistics of the people who work there, the people who visit, their different flows and experiences of the building”. “And then, of course, the environmental side, in terms of the roof having six different functions related to environmental performance , and the flexibility of the interiors and so on,” Bäckman Faulkner says. Adaptive re-use driven by policy, user experience Client ambitions, market demands, and policy frameworks are accelerating the need for a greater and deeper engagement with sustainability in the fields of Australian architecture and property development. Bäckman Faulkner says that the Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards, which mandate climate disclosures for a growing range of organisations, are accelerating an interest in adaptive re-use projects which emphasise circularity of materials . “There’s all of these really great ambitions. Everyone has their decarbonisation roadmaps. They’re all in place, but the targets are coming very quick. ▲ 3XN and Cox Architecture were recently announced as the preferred design team for the Gold Coast Arena. “The move from setting the roadmap, to taking the actions or establishing the kind of the strategy needed to achieve it—that’s where GXN would like to help.” But GXN research can identify not only when adaptive re-use can lead to emissions savings, but where and how design and experience can be improved. “I’m not talking about heritage buildings now, I’m talking about buildings that most people don’t love,” Bäckman Faulkner says. “We see where we can also find material histories that we can tie back into the user experience of the buildings. So using the idea of the historical materials as a way to enhance texture and materiality in the new design, and that then also uplifts that behavioral experience.” De-risking innovation, rethinking costs GXN is happy to make a mess in the laboratory, Bäckman Faulkner says, because it translates to better results in the field. “A lot of our research projects are also demonstrators or pavilions, so it’s applied research, we’re testing in alignment with industry and city councils. “And that research component, for us, is very much where we can try and test things and they fail, and then we try again until it works. And that’s fine, because they’re in the research environment. ▲ GXN worked early with Pymble Ladies College on circular and behavioural design for its redevelopment. “Then we can go and confidently say to clients that ‘This sounds really innovative, but we already have a proven concept’. And I think that balance is super important for us as well, because we understand clients don’t want to be the first ones to take a risk on things.” Clients benefit from GXN pushing the envelope, according to Bäckman Faulkner. “In the same way that we get challenged by projects, it’s also nice to challenge projects and try to drive innovation forward. ▲ The Secondary Innovation Precinct at PLC will incorporate a robotics lab, dining hall and campus green with amphitheatre. “Of course, we respond to the boundaries that we have, but having that research component linked to us means that we can also try to push boundaries and test things.” And reframing the cost-benefit analysis behind sustainability is part of that mix. “There can be an industry mindset sometimes, that we have a tendency to think that sustainability is costly,” Bäckman Faulkner says. “But instead, when it is part of the design, it is an opportunity to save money, to create stronger identities and to create better stories for the buildings overall.”

Unloved Buildings Untapped Opportunity in Australia’s Cost Crunch

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