Chinese breathing competitive life into Sydney high-rise scene

The arrival of the Chinese-based Greenland Group to Australian shores is an auspicious occasion.

The group will build Sydney's tallest residential high-rise on the former Water Board site after paying around $100 million to the loss-taking Canada-based Brookfield Asset Management with whom it will, in a face-saving arrangement, reportedly team up to assist in the development of the tower.

In a statement to Dow Jones, the Chinese group put the value of the residential and hotel project at $480 million $497 million.

The project, to be called Sydney Greenland Center.

The Bathurst Street site has stage-one development approval for 400 apartments over up to 70 levels reaching 240 metres high. In July last year Brookfield unveiled the tallest residential tower plans at 240 metres, beating off Meriton's 230-metre tall World Tower, which dates back to 2004. Any new tower such as the current Kann Finch concept (pictured below) will appear considerably taller as it is built further up a ridge than World Tower. There are five office towers that are taller than World Tower.

The 115 Bathurst Street/339 Pitt Street mixed-use project is on a 4,000-square-metre site, with a retail and commercial podium, which incorporates the adaptive reuse of its eight-storey heritage listed 1930s Pitt Street building, but the demolition of the 1970s brutalist style office block.

“The healthy and stable property market in Australia has given big confidence to investors,” Zhang Yuliang, chairman of Shanghai Greenland, said in the statement.

“New immigrants, including those from China, have boosted property purchase demand in the country and we expect it to be sustainable.”

Greenland, which ranks 483rd in the 2012 Fortune Global 500 list, has earned a reputation for landmark buildings highlighted just this week when the group accepted coveted prizes for Breathing Tower (pictured below), a 75-storey building in Wujiang, China.

It took the prize in the tall buildings category, along with the competition's overall future projects, in the eleventh annual MIPIM Architectural Review Future Project Awards competition. 

The Future Projects Awards is chaired by Paul Finch, editorial director of the Architectural Review, who noted the envisaged building highlighted the trend in favour of energy saving, low carbon buildings continues, and the exploration of different geometries made possible by digital design tools.

It was deemed the clear winner showing a "confident control of form" and  given its mix uses demonstrated skillful integration.

Addressing China's poor air quality issue, the Breathing Tower will have a series of operable windows either side of the upper storeys of the office, hotel and residential tower, which will open into an atrium which has a ventilation system. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill were the architects, ofcourse of Burj Dubai world tallest notoriety.

Since 1992, the state-owned Shanghai based group - which has the corporate tenet of “Greenland, create better life” has positioned itself to be 87th among the top 500 China enterprises.

Its construction projects are in 65 cities in 24 provinces of China.

Among its 17 extra-high landmark buildings currently being developed, three are listed among Top 10 extra-high buildings across the world. Bathurst Street will be another, knocking off Harry Triguboff's World Tower.

As well as its leading position in real estate industry, Greenland Group develops energy, including owing several coal mines in Inner Mongolia, Shanxi and Guizhou.

We know the Chinese love their brands, and apparently the brand “Greenland” has been certified as “Chinese Famous Brand” by the State Bureau of Industrial and Commercial Administration. 

Greenland Group's stated aim is to enter the Fortune 200 list by 2015.

The MIPIM Architectural Review Future Project Awards celebrate un-built or incomplete design projects, and are intended to showcase fine architecture and creativity, and the response to the client development brief. The only Australian entrant - among the 186 projects from 46 countries - was Stamford on Macquarie for Stamford Property Services.

Photos courtesy of Architectural Review and Kann Finch.

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