Eight weeks after a tree rode a crane to the summit, the world’s tallest hybrid timber tower has almost no timber left to show the street. This week Kylan Low, who the Australian Timber Design Awards organiser and structural engineer for the Timber Development Association, went down to Central with a camera, and the pictures show the herringbone glass line has climbed past the last of the habitats. What is still open is the crown screen and the hoist runs, and both of those go before the year is out.
Behind that glass sit 39 storeys, 180 metres, and more than 30,000 cubic metres of cross-laminated timber and glulam, by Taylor Thomson Whitting’s count, threaded through 21 of the tower’s floors. The European spruce came from Stora Enso and from Austria’s Wiehag, and it is arranged as seven four-storey habitats, each stacking three levels of timber flooring between steel and concrete mega floors, inside a white steel exoskeleton that does the lateral work.
Tim Allen, the timber structural lead at Taylor Thomson Whitting, has put the logic behind that mix in a single line.
“It comes down to using the right timber for the right application,” Allen said.
It is a structure that took the world title in April, when it passed Milwaukee’s 86.6 metre Ascent in the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s rankings, and it reached its full height on 22 July with a tree hanging from the crane in an Atlassian Central planter, 180 metres above the platforms.
Facade and central building services are all that remain on the program, with practical completion held at the end of 2026 and up to 5,000 workers to follow through the office levels, while Atlassian itself takes five of its seven habitats from late 2028. Below the offices, a 500-bed YHA co-living hostel fills the lower five floors behind the reinstated 1906 Parcel Shed.
SHoP Architects designed the tower with Sydney’s BVN, and the pair kept the spruce ceilings exposed inside every habitat, so that what has disappeared from the street stays overhead for the people who will work there.
“Connecting people to each other, nature and to the city around them,” said Andreia Teixeira, associate principal at SHoP, describing spatial qualities the New York practice can now walk through rather than model.
The skin the timber disappears behind carries 1,794 Onyx Solar louvres for a building targeting a 6 Star Green Star rating and 100 per cent renewable power, on a structure Dexus credits with half the embodied carbon of a conventional tower.
We wrote last week about timber taking the biggest jobs in every capital, and this is what the end of one of those jobs looks like, at the point where a record stops being a construction story and becomes a building people will simply walk into. The Sydney Fish Market opened in January on 594 glulam beams, the Cutaway opened its 13 timber trees in May, excavators are into Macquarie Point, and Icon is building the mass timber pit complex at Albert Park, but Atlassian Central is the one you can see from the train.
Low says that run of projects has changed the question people ask. “I’ve seen many high profile projects now that use timber, so why are these unique?” he said, and he calls that a really good place for us to rest on, a point at which timber stops being the exception and starts being the obvious answer.
Atlassian Central is not in this year’s field, because our entries are open to projects completed within the last three years and the tower will not reach practical completion until the end of 2026, which makes it a candidate for the 28th awards rather than the 27th. That narrow window is deliberate, so the work is known while it is still new. <!– CTA BUTTONS –>
Fifty-seven projects are in front of the judges this year, running from a second-year furniture maker to a 180-metre record holder in waiting, because we celebrate timber projects of every scale, and the winners of the 27th Australian Timber Design Awards will be announced on Wednesday 21 October in the Harbourside Room at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
