3XN's upcycled Quay Quarter Tower is the 2022 World Building of the Year

The final day of this year’s World Architecture Festival in Lisbon has culminated in 3XN’s Quay Quarter Tower named the World Building of the Year during a special ceremony at the city’s historic converted Convento Do Beato.

The 46-story Sydney tower provides a remarkable example of adaptive reuse to the industry, having retained some 65% of the original 1976 structure and a reported 95% of its core in the construction process that was completed in April of 2022.

"The winner was commissioned to provide a building on a world-class site, and to retain a huge proportion of an existing fifty-year-old commercial tower," WAF Program Director Paul Finch praised the winning scheme. "The result was an excellent example of adaptive reuse. It has an excellent carbon story, and it is an example of anticipatory workspace design produced pre-COVID which nevertheless has provided healthy and attractive space for post-pandemic users. The client was prepared to risk building out an idea on a speculative basis — it worked."

Its design entails a stacked program of five rotated volumes that conceal a "vertical village" of atria connecting to form a "social spine" throughout the tower, the capacity of which has been expanded from 4,500 to 10,000 thanks to the addition of new floor plates. In terms of its sustainability bonafides, the tower performs at an industry-leading high rate with an estimated embodied carbon savings equal to over 12,000 metric tonnes.

Other 2022 WAF winners included Condition_Lab's Pingtan Children Library in the World Interior of the Year category; CAATStudio (Kamboozia Architecture and Design Studio)'s Dream Pathway in Iran in The Future Project of the Year category; and the Preservation and Rehabilitation of Rural Landscape of Gaodang from SHANCUN Atelier and the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University + Anshun Institute of Architectural Design in the Landscape of the Year category.

More information about additional WAF winners can be found in our coverage of this year's World Architecture Festival Day 1 and Day 2 winners.