Designed in collaboration with Grimshaw and Panov Scott, Pitt 338 is a proposal for a hotel and apartments within a tower in Sydney’s midtown, set against the backdrop of a recovered landscape of undulating topography formed by terraces, and navigated through by way of gardens, courts, passages and stairs. The tower assembles a layering of off-set platforms, creating corners and an array of diverse open spaces with filtered light, and a simplicity of form, colour and materiality designed for people desiring the interrelationship between place, landscape and residence.

The bounding buildings of hotel and office suites with 4000sqm of retail, are held between vertical bands of honed precast concrete columns, varying in width, depth and frequency in correspondence to their internal use and adjacent context. The material density and scale modelled in light and shadow, animates and orders the assemblage of varying building that compose the city block, and introduces an urban character that seeks a continuity with that of the city to the north while acknowledges the diversity of its neighbours.

The tower is formed in three 10m by 40m stepping bars, biased to the east and configured in diagonal steps to minimise the overshadowing impacts to the south, and to maintain the most slender proportions. The ten apartments per level are composed to capture sun and views, with six on corners enjoying up to three aspects. This strategy allows the highest levels of amenity and experience to be enjoyed, a modularity that allows high efficiency, and a structural simplicity that gives cost efficiency to enable a greater investment into the quality of the enclosing layers. The linear bans give priority to the urban order of the City as observed from its streets and in respect to its foreground presentation to Hyde Park. Its formal configuration gives definition to relationship to Hyde Park to the south and the Sydney Opera House to the North.

The buildings which have street and podium level retail and hospitality, all have roof terraces and gardens for the enjoyment of the residents and guests. The ensemble of podium scaled buildings of varying heights define an internal public realm and streetscape with activities and give transitionary urban elements which are independent but related to the tower. A porous site imbued with public open landscaped courts and terraces occurs instead of private interior space circumscribing a tower.

The overall effect of the layering of the façade with glazed mesh panels for environmental and visual amenity, allows a very light and transparent architecture to arise. The layers of transparency, translucency and solidity occurring at different banding dimensions and angles, allows play of light – transmittance, reflection and shading – that’s all together de-materialising, and defining in materiality and effect. It achieves a unique beauty of variance from its functionality and allows the tower to alter in perception from any angle of observation and across the various times of day and night.  A tower of ephemeral temporality.

SMART DESIGN STUDIO ARCHITECTURE FROM THE INSIDE OUT