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Sydney apartment block named best tall building in the world

Block features hanging gardens and an internal water recycling plant

PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 12 November, 2014, 9:48pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 13 November, 2014, 4:30am

The Guardian



One Central Park in Sydney beat dozens of rival towers.

A residential building in Sydney has been named the best tall building in the world.

One Central Park, by French design group Ateliers Jean Nouvel and Australia's PTW, beat 88 other international entries to top the list, and was commended for its visible use of green design.

The building's key features include hanging gardens, a cantilevered heliostat, an internal water recycling plant and low-carbon power plant.

The award was announced last Friday by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat based at Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology.

The council's executive director and competition juror Antony Wood said of the winning work: "Seeing this project for the first time stopped me dead. One Central Park strongly points the way forward, not only for an essential naturalisation of our built environment, but for a new aesthetic for our cities - an aesthetic entirely appropriate to the environmental challenges of our age."

French landscape artist Patrick Blanc was commissioned to design the 1,120 square metres of vertical gardens that cover the surface of the building. Some 35,200 plants and 383 different species were used, including some natives such as acacias.

The gardens use a remote-controlled, dripper irrigation system and a special process developed by Blanc in which the roots of a plant are attached to a mesh-covered felt, soaked with mineralised water.

Mick Caddey, development director of Central Park, said that while it is the building's on-site water recycling factory and power plant that are responsible for most of the water and energy savings, the gardens are a visible and tangible reminder of innovative green infrastructure.

One Central Park is also unusual for its cantilever heliostat that is covered in a series of reflector panels. These panels automatically redirect natural sunlight to a nearby park during shady periods of the day.

Completed in late 2013, the 623-apartment building is just one part of a US$2b mixed-use development located in a part of inner Sydney undergoing major regeneration.





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