One of the world’s first upcycled towers shows how reusing the bones of a building can be an environmentally and economically viable solution for the world’s aging towers.

Hidden inside the recently crowned World Building of the Year is a 1970s office building. Located near Sydney, Australia’s central business district, that simple 45-story rectangular building, originally built in 1976, had been falling out of favor in recent years and losing tenants to newer towers. To compete, the building’s owner, AMP Capital, decided to do something new. But not that new.

An international competition was launched in 2014 to redesign the building, with a few key stipulations. The existing building would not be demolished, and any new design would have to keep as much of the original structure as possible. Rather than a teardown, the building’s owners wanted a facelift.

The competition’s winning design came from the Danish architecture firm 3XN, which did more than just slap a new face on the building. 3XN’s design preserved most of the original building’s concrete structure and core while dramatically reshaping its rectangular floor plates into a stack of rotating trapezoids that optimize views of nearby Sydney Harbor and the iconic Sydney Opera House. The 49-story building, now named Quay Quarter Tower, is being called the world’s first upcycled skyscraper.

“Both from a sustainability point of view and also from an economic point of view, in the future we need to reuse as much as possible the existing structures we have around the world,” says Kim Herforth Nielsen, founder of 3XN. “And we’ve learned in this big case here that it’s doable.”

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