CTBUH Video Interview – Ross Palmer & Gerard Evenden

Well, I think what's happening with the Sydney Metro is where we're currently looking at six stations. What's interesting is that they're not just metro projects; they're projects linking to oversight development. So what will follow the metro will be the oversight developments above the metro, and those are completely interlinked with the transportation system below, thereby connecting critical pieces of urban infrastructure together. I think both Jared and myself have been involved in a number of infrastructure rail projects, and probably the most significant was Canary Wharf tube station in London. What we can see from that, it was finished in 2000, it's an underground station, but the impact of that station on the surroundings with the Canary Wharf development has been profound. Huge towers have cropped up around it. So as a practice, we're very interested in being involved in these types of projects because since then, people now consider them together—the infrastructure and these developments should be linked. That's something we're working on a number of projects around the world, and something we'd like to get involved with here, so it's very exciting.

Well, I think the interesting thing at the moment is that transportation is changing. With the changes in transportation, the revolution that is about to happen with autonomous vehicles, the type of transport we're all going to be experiencing is going to be different. It's going to be safer, it's going to interface with people in a different way, and that's definitely going to influence the urban fabric and the whole structure of cities. We're all used to individual transportation, driving ourselves. In the future, shared transportation is going to become much bigger than it is currently. So it's no surprise really that cities are relooking at the structure of their transport infrastructure. And Circular Key Tower, which is our current project in Sydney, we're designing—about to submit for the DA—that albeit is not over a rail station, it is intrinsically linked as a site to the transport network, to the interchange at Circular Key, not just the ferries and obviously the development of George Street with the introduction of light rail and transit being installed now. That project is a very big building, it's going to be the tallest commercial tower in Sydney. The way it links into the urban fabric and the transport network, which at the end of the day is how people move through the city to these buildings and up them, is really significant. It will be the success of the project because the city has done so much work thinking about this and putting the right rules and regulations in place to make it happen.

It's really through the network of laneways that link to it. Also, the tower sits between two major roads—George Street and Pitt Street—and those are at slightly different levels, so that's allowed us to introduce a split-level arrangement of the ground plane. Normally in a tower, the lobby hits the ground and that can tend not to activate the ground plane. In this project it's going to be completely different: the lobby is raised, the ground plane is surrounded by laneways and retail. So the tower brings a benefit to the city. There's also provision in the tower for cyclists—storage for 250 cycles at the base, an area where repairs can be carried out, bike hire—that's actually in the brief for the project. And that all sits adjacent to the public square. There is some parking, not very many—I think from memory it's 90 spaces—so a small parking component. But the real goal of the city, I think, in the creation of this project and defining the envelope, was that it's linked to the infrastructure and transport network in Sydney.

I think the really connected city will be the smart city, the one that's connected not only to infrastructure but also to the tech, to the communication systems coming into the city and how they all relate to one another. How do we power our transport in the future? How does that come from the ground? How do the vehicles interface with the power network? How does data travel as we travel in different ways? Part of our issue in the future will be whether people need to come into cities, whether people need to come to work. We can work from home, we can carry on our lives and our work lives with a mobile device. So you have to ask yourself: why do people want to go to work? What do we need to provide for people who want to go to work? Because you will have a choice, and that will be a huge change. We are working with a number of technology companies who are posing these questions because they're behind this kind of revolution in the way people might work in the future. But interestingly, for a couple of headquarters projects, their driving force in the brief was: how do we actually attract people into these buildings because they can work remotely? As Jared was just saying, the reality is from a creativity point of view, people need to meet and be together and share ideas, and that's how innovation occurs. So the challenge they've given us on other projects is to create the workplace of the future that brings these people in so they want to be at work, and that will ultimately lead to creativity, innovation, and the next round of products. That will also change how the work environment needs to be connected together. At the moment we arrange buildings in towers with vertical floor plates; there may have to be much more visual connection through the buildings from one floor to another because of the way people are interfacing with each other.

Well, I think the whole principles of towers are being questioned. Again, we're in a moment of transition. What is saleable space now may not be saleable space in the future. At the bottom of the Circular Key Tower we've got innovation space, spaces with a higher floor-to-floor dimension than in other areas of the tower. Those are specific areas to attract incubation groups, which would be definitive future tenants in the tower later. These are things architects are being challenged with today, and we design for that flexibility. For example, in the Circular Key Tower project we are designing what we call soft spots in the floor plate—parts of the slabs that can be removed to provide connecting stairs or voids—so that tenants can actually change the building over time and create links between different floor levels. But we go beyond that because we as a practice are really interested in the very long-term future of buildings and how long they're going to last. We like to look at how they might be changed, so maybe an office building changes to an apartment building in the future. You can actually make structural elements that can be changed without compromising the building. It's just how you plan it. In relation to Circular Key Tower, it's column-free; the structure is on the outside of the building and the building is free of columns inside, which gives total flexibility between office, residential, or mixed-use. Typically in a tower, the column grid inside the floor plate becomes the defining element for how you position walls. Whatever column grid you do will ultimately be a constraint in the future. So if you can get rid of those... It's a project we're lucky enough that the proportions of the floor plate are such that we've been able to do that, working with some very creative engineers, and we've achieved a concrete floor plate.

Well, the two are linked together. This particular tower, Circular Key Tower, has an unusual floor plate that came from the kind of stage 1 planning envelope. What we thought was important was that, because the floor plate is of a size and shape that's not typical, it was very important for the users of the building to have the flexibility not to be constrained by a column grid. The sizes were such that we were able to achieve these spans, and the spans are quite big, but working with the engineers we've managed to get there. So the big picture is that the long-term future of that building is very robust and gives great flexibility.

Absolutely. The longevity of the building is everything in terms of sustainability. If you're not demolishing the building in 50 years, if the building can transform itself into another working environment or living environment, you've got the future.

I think the interesting thing if you take the autonomous vehicle is that it doesn't need to look or act like any vehicle we have today. For example, when you leave your home in the morning and a vehicle picks you up, what is that vehicle? Is that your workplace? Do you start working from the moment you step into the vehicle? You don't need to think any longer in the vehicle, or is it an entertainment space? Can you hold a meeting in it? There's already in California some tech companies taking their staff to work in buses where they start working on the bus. Once you take away the driver, once you give the privacy of a single unit, the opportunities are enormous. There's big change not just in terms of how vehicles function and drive themselves; there's obviously an enormous change in the whole concept of ownership of these types of vehicles. Traditionally everyone would think about buying that vehicle. I think we're seeing it already with car sharing, and the autonomous vehicle side of things I think will move that even more. I'm pretty sure they won't look as much like cars as Jared was going through there. I think they're going to change radically.

I think we have to respond to the urban environment changing completely. The relationship between pedestrian and vehicle changes because you can control a vehicle, you can't control a pedestrian. A human being will do what he wants to do, so when you mix the two together you get an inefficiency because when a vehicle knows to stop because of an interaction, that creates an inefficiency if the two collide. So how do you deal with that? Do we separate vehicles and people? How do we make people and vehicles work together in a very efficient way? Obviously, the time for moving around the city will also change because your vehicle will take the shortest route, time between meetings, people will become more efficient. All of these things are going to change cities. And I'm looking forward to that change. Absolutely. I think we're at the crossroads of a new industrial revolution; I'm very much looking forward to that change in the future. I think it's what makes our jobs exciting, something we'd love to react to and be involved with. The future's bright.