Sydney architects are creating more and more multi-storey, multi-use buildings that are both functional and highly innovative, with office, retail and residential spaces all combined behind gleaming futuristic facades.

V By Crown

Crown’s new V Building, now under construction in Parramatta, is a perfect example of this new architectural trend. Costing around $300 million, it will house a hotel, office and retail space and 420 high-end apartments, offering excellent property investment potential.

The V Building will be 26 storeys high and feature a stunning aluminium-curtained façade that conceals the residential balconies within its folds and presents a clean, geometric form to the world.

With four historical convict-era huts housed on the site and a rooftop garden offering spectacular panoramic views, the V Building has been dubbed ‘the jewel in the city’s urban renewal’, and the rush to buy apartments there is evidence of a growing view amongst investors that location and convenience outweigh home size.

Central Park

Another vision of Sydney’s exciting urban future, and a much sought after investment property, is Central Park, under construction in downtown Sydney. A $2 billion urban village, Central Park will consist of 11 multi-storey buildings, incorporating the old Kent Brewery, all set around a spacious 6,400 square metre park in the centre.

Central Park will contain shops, cafes, restaurants and offices interlaced with laneways and terraced gardens and will include around 2,000 residential apartments.

The first residential tower, called One Central Park, will be topped by a hovering cantilever containing luxurious penthouses and a ‘heliostat’, which is an assembly of motorised mirrors that will capture and direct sunlight down into the park all year round. After dark, the cantilever becomes the backdrop for an LED art installation. One Central Park is expected to be completed by mid 2013.

Barangaroo

Barangaroo is a massive 22-hectare waterfront site to the west of Sydney that is being redeveloped by the New South Wales government into a multi-use precinct that will include offices, hotels, shops and apartments.

In line with the ‘vertical village’ concept, architectural firm, LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) has proposed that one of the residential components of Barangaroo should be two multi-storey towers.

According to LAVA, these slender towers would extend the surrounding parklands up their flanks in a spiralling ‘green wrap’ of private balcony gardens. Such a unique residential concept is expected to attract a lot of interest from buyers and investors.

Developer, Lend Lease, believes Barangaroo has the potential to become the greenest residential, shopping and business centre anywhere in the world.

Building upwards would seem to be the only viable solution for cities such as Sydney, where the population is tipped to pass one million by 2030, so the more liveable we can make these multi-storey, multi-use structures, the more likely it will be that vertical living and working will become the way of the future everywhere.