Facade crews are closing on the last exposed timber inside the world’s tallest hybrid timber tower, with new images obtained by Wood Central on Tuesday showing Atlassian Central’s upper habitats still open to the winter sky as the glass line climbs beneath two remaining cranes. It comes as Dexus confirms facade installation and central building services as the remaining program on the $1.45 billion build, two weeks after the tower topped out 180 metres above Sydney’s Central Station.
“Years of investment in innovative construction methods, advanced modelling and in-house capability,” Marco Rossi, Built’s Executive Chairman, Group CEO, and Founder, said of the digital engineering he credits with letting the Built Obayashi Joint Venture build and sequence one of Australia’s most complex projects virtually, long before work began on site. Rossi claims the build sets a new benchmark for the industry, with the joint venture now working the tower from the inside as hard as the outside.
Building each habitat has run from the inside out, with crews standing the timber first and the glass following, the sequence Dexus set out when it revealed the first completed habitat in September last year. This week’s images show that order playing out at the summit, where bare cross-laminated timber decks and their white steel diagonals wait above a glazing line climbing into the final habitats.
Stora Enso and Austria’s Wiehag supplied the European spruce now waiting for its cover, with more than 30,000 cubic metres of cross-laminated timber and glulam threaded through 21 of the tower’s 39 storeys, by Taylor Thomson Whitting’s count. Every habitat stacks three levels of timber flooring between steel-and-concrete mega floors, opening into the naturally ventilated park levels that Dexus counts as a first for a commercial high-rise.
“Connecting people to each other, nature and to the city around them,” Andreia Teixeira, associate principal at SHoP Architects, said of spatial qualities the New York practice can now walk rather than model, describing a high-rise that reimagines a natural habitat within an urban tower. SHoP designed the tower alongside Sydney’s BVN, and the pair kept the spruce ceilings exposed inside each habitat, so the timber leaves the skyline without leaving the workplace.
“This is a moment of global significance,” Peter Titmuss, a BVN principal, said of a prototype he credits with proving prefabrication, dry construction, and a faster, lighter vertical build at tower scale. The record itself was settled in April, when the structure passed Milwaukee’s 86.6 metre Ascent to take the world title in the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s rankings.
Sealing the habitats does more than weatherproof them, with the facade’s 1,794 Onyx Solar louvres generating power for a tower targeting a 6 Star Green Star rating, 100 per cent renewable electricity, and half the operational energy of a conventional 5 Star NABERS base building. Behind the reinstated 1906 Parcel Shed, a 500-bed YHA co-living hostel fills the lower five floors.
Up to 5,000 workers will follow through the office levels once fit-out completes, with Dexus holding practical completion at the end of 2026 and Atlassian taking five of its seven habitats from late 2028. Dexus credits the spruce with halving the tower’s embodied carbon compared with a conventional build, and once the glass closes over the last open decks, the record will still stand over Central Station while the timber that set it is only visible to people inside.
