Upcycling Stockland Piccadilly
While there’s a consistent and valuable focus across the property sector to construct highly sustainable buildings at greenfield projects, in some cases, the best sustainability outcomes are in retrofitting and working with existing structures.
This is the thinking behind Stockland’s decision to upcycle its Stockland Piccadilly office tower – and the company’s head office - in Sydney’s central business district, keeping the ‘bones’ of the existing 1990s building and creating a new structure around it.
In 2021, the City of Sydney supported Stockland's request to plan for a new 36-storey premium grade office tower spanning 100,000 square metres of floor space.
The original plan was to demolish the existing building and start afresh, but a review of world-leading sustainability practices prompted a change of thinking.
Research highlighted that due to the embodied carbon in the existing building the best sustainability outcome is to retain rather than demolish. This will significantly reduce the carbon emissions associated with the building's redevelopment.
The Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) estimates that if Australia reduced the embodied carbon emissions in new commercial and residential buildings by just 10% between now and 2050 this would eliminate at least 63.5 megatonnes of emissions, the equivalent to taking 13.8 million cars off the road for a year.
According to the GBCA, in 2019, embodied carbon made up 16% of Australia’s built environment emissions. If nothing is done to address this, due to operational emission reductions, this could increase to as much as 85% by 2050.
Stockland EGM Workplace and Management, Emlyn Keane, said keeping the original structure and working to ‘upcycle’ the building made the most sense.
“We’re now exploring ways to retain most of the structure of our existing Piccadilly building and to effectively ‘upcycle’ the building.’
“The idea is to create a new development around the 30-year-old building, which means the existing concrete and steel is retained and repurposed to form the backbone of the new structure.
“Our early designs show we can expect to save around 23,000 tonnes of embodied carbon.”
Further information
Learn more about Stockland Piccadilly here.
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