Rising 275 metres above the famous harbour,
Crown Sydney is about to become the city’s tallest building.
With a striking form and cutting-edge engineering,
the AUD $2.2BN skyscraper quickly emerged
as one of the country’s most impressive megaprojects.
But as the tower topped-out and neared completion,
the Coronavirus pandemic hit the project team with an unprecedented challenge.
This is how Sydney’s tallest new skyscraper is being completed from home.
Rising from a former shipyard, Crown Sydney will be the centrepiece of the
city’s regenerated Barangaroo district - offering
views of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, while dominating the skyline.
Also known as One Barangaroo, the 71-storey structure will boast a six-star hotel,
VIP casino and 82 high-end apartments - while the ground-level podium will offer
shops, cafes and two rooftop infinity pools.
Designed by Wilkinson Eyre and delivered by Bates Smart, with structural engineering by
Robert Bird Group, the building’s curved form is inspired by nature,
mimicking three petals that twist and rise together.
The result is a slender tower in which every floor-plate is unique,
clad with over 7,000 individually cut glass panels.
Rising to the challenge, engineers built a concrete core
surrounded by a steel and concrete superstructure.
Raking columns enabled them to achieve the tower’s 60-degree twist while a 200-tonne
tuned mass damper on the 70th floor ensures stability in the face of lateral forces,
like strong winds.
But while most of us associate skyscrapers with vertical engineering,
the most interesting part of this building actually sits below ground.
With the timeline threatened by ground contaminants and a high water table,
the team built the tower’s basement with the top-down approach.
With piles and the ground floor slab in place, works proceeded in two directions.
While the skyscraper began to rise above, the basement was steadily excavated
beneath, with plant and material moved through an opening in the concrete floor.
Despite adding further complexity,
the approach cut the project’s overall build time by more than 12 months.
When it topped out in early 2020, it seemed that Crown Sydney’s greatest
challenges had been overcome - but few could have predicted what would come next.
With Australia going into lockdown, the project team faced the daunting prospect
of completing the tower’s complex fit-out from their kitchen tables - coordinating
different specifications between the hotel, casino and apartments
across 71 unique floor plates and all in a market
where tenants’ needs were quickly changing.
Thankfully, earlier investments in digital collaboration had put them in a good position.
When works first started in 2016,
the team had used hand-drawn mark-ups across hundreds of physical documents.
But the tower’s unique form created an unusually high number of drawings
and - after somewhat drowning in their paperwork - a small group of engineers
at Robert Bird Group began trialling Bluebeam Revu for mark-ups and coordination.
Six months later, the entire team was converted
and Sydney’s tallest skyscraper became a paperless project.
When remote working was imposed in 2020, the team were able to continue
communicating in real time through Bluebeam Revu, marking-up documents,
flagging issues and reviewing comments in a clear and easy to track system,
while works continued on site with social distancing measures in place.
The tool enabled this complex megaproject to remain on track for completion in late
2020, navigating an unprecedented event without huge levels of disruption.
While the pandemic has of course presented a much greater challenge to other major
projects and the construction sector globally, similar cases of teams overhauling their
approaches with digital technologies can now be seen around the world.
Across Robert Bird Group alone, Bluebeam Revu has become commonplace,
taking all kinds of projects down the paperless road; from Australia’s
Cross River Rail scheme to the megatall Merdeka PNB 118 in Malaysia -
set to become the world’s second tallest skyscraper.
For Crown Sydney, the impact is clear - and this remarkably complex scheme wouldn’t be
approaching completion with so few missteps or delays without the use of digital tools.
While many of us may not realise the scale of the challenge
that remote working has thrown at the construction sector in 2020,
the story of Crown Sydney is testament to the power of digital collaboration
and the resilience of those men and women tasked with continuing to build our world.
This video and the Crown Sydney skyscraper were made possible by Bluebeam.
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