The world’s tallest hybrid timber building has reached its full height, with a tree riding the crane to the summit as Atlassian Central topped out 39 storeys and 180 metres above Sydney’s Central Station. That is according to Atlassian co-founder and chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes, who marked the milestone at Wednesday’s rooftop ceremony alongside NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey, four years after the Built Obayashi Joint Venture broke ground on the $1.45 billion build.
Builders have marked full height with a hoisted tree for centuries, and Wednesday’s tree settled on a structure that raced past Milwaukee’s 86.6 metre Ascent in April to hold the world title in the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s rankings. By the project’s halfway mark in 2024, 1,500 workers had already logged 500,000 hours raising the podium and exoskeleton.
Beneath the parapet sit more than 30,000 cubic metres of cross-laminated timber and glulam, by Taylor Thomson Whitting’s count, cut from European spruce, supplied by Stora Enso and Austria’s Wiehag, and stacked through 21 of the tower’s 39 storeys. Dexus credits the substitution of concrete and steel for halving the building’s embodied carbon compared with a conventional tower.
“It comes down to using the right timber for the right application,” Tim Allen, TTW’s timber structural lead, has said of a design that threads seven four-storey habitats through the high rise, each sandwiching three levels of CLT flooring between steel-and-concrete mega floor plates. Every habitat rises from a seven-storey podium inside the steel exoskeleton that gives the tower its lateral strength, opening into naturally ventilated garden levels Dexus bills as a first for high-rise commercial space.
“We’re jumping up five levels every time,” Peter Morley, the Dexus project director, has said of a sequence that ran the steel ahead while crews returned to infill the timber within each zone. Morley told the project team last October that the build had passed its most technical structural phase, and the tower has stayed on programme since.
Atlassian reached the top in four months after cutting nearly 500 Australian jobs as part of 1,600 worldwide, and one week after Cannon-Brookes defended the economics of the tower to the Australian Financial Review.
“I don’t think [AI] stops the need for people coming together to work,” Cannon-Brookes said on Wednesday, predicting more collaboration and meeting spaces rather than fewer inside a workplace he claims will be the most technologically advanced building in Australia. Intelligent controls, environmental systems, and a modern data platform will run the tower as a single system, he said, behind a facade already generating power through 1,794 Onyx Solar louvres, inside an operation targeting a 6 Star Green Star rating and 100 per cent renewable power.
“Bearing witness to the rise and rise of an engineering marvel,” is how Mookhey described the tower from street level, with the NSW Government counting the project as the anchor of its Tech Central precinct across Haymarket and Redfern, where the Dexus and Frasers Central Place Sydney towers rise next door. Mookhey credited world-leading expertise, an immigrant population, and an ambitious university sector with making the precinct possible.
Below the office levels, a 500-bed YHA co-living hostel fills the lower five floors, returning the operator to the site it held before construction, with the heritage 1906 Parcel Shed reinstated as the lobby for the incoming Atlassian workforce.
It comes as the tower tracks toward practical completion in November, one month after crews dismantled the first of the project’s three tower cranes ahead of the final pour. Once fit-out completes, up to 5,000 workers and more than 450 hotel guests will fill the building, with Atlassian taking occupation of five of its seven timber habitats in late 2028, according to Dexus.
