Sydney’s new Fish Market opened its doors to much fanfare yesterday, with queues spilling along Blackwattle Bay and demand far exceeding expectations for the city’s most culturally important harbourside development in 50 years.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, enormous crowds snaked from the streets around the entrance from the moment trading began, with visitors told they would need to wait even if they held restaurant bookings, while others were advised to return later once the crush eased.
The frenzy marked the public’s first encounter with what is now the largest seafood market in the Southern Hemisphere — and the largest timber roof anywhere in the region. Defined by its sweeping, wave‑like canopy, the new market sits beside the old Glebe facility and is expected to draw more than six million visitors every year.
Its defining feature — extensively covered by Wood Central over the past two years — is its glulam roof, pre‑assembled on Glebe Island and transported to the site by barge. The floating, solar-powered canopy uses harbour breezes to naturally ventilate and self‑cool the building, forming the architectural identity of the new precinct.
Last year, Wood Central exclusively spoke to Gianlugui Traetta and Nicola Leonardelli, who travelled from Northern Italy to present the project at the World Conference on Timber Engineering in Brisbane, revealing that the $800m plus market was constructed using 1,800 cubic metres of timber, all manufactured, pre‑assembled and shipped in sections from Rubner Timber Engineering’s state‑of‑the‑art facility near the Dolomites.
“This is one of the most complicated parts of the project. We shipped 594 glulam parts in 160 packages inside the vessel’s hold — not in containers — with the longest piece measuring 32.7 metres,” Traetta said. “After eight weeks of transit, the timber arrived at Glebe, not Port Botany, where it was unloaded and taken across by barge to the site’s harbourside entry.”
Gianlugui Traetta – Sales Manager for Rubner Holzbau GmbH – who spoke to Wood Central’s Jason Ross from the sidelines at the World Conference on Timber Engineering in Brisbane.
Leonardelli, who leads Rubner Holzbau Sri’s structural engineering team, said pre‑assembly was critical to speed and quality. “This allowed us to manufacture the timber elements in our factory, in a controlled environment, which delivered much better quality on site.”
Sydney has now emerged as a global hotspot for timber engineering, with the Atlassian Central Tower — the world’s largest timber‑hybrid tower — rising rapidly above Sydney Central Station. Earlier this month, Wood Central revealed that the tower, dubbed “the timber building inside a much larger building,” had made major progress over the Christmas and New Year period, with crews installing cross‑laminated timber panels and glulam beams inside levels 33 and 35.
Slated to open later this year, the $1.8 billion, 39‑storey ‘plyscraper’ is less than 3km from the market and will eventually use more than 30,000 cubic metres of timber — supplied by European giants Stora Enso and Wiehag — across 21 storeys, with seven three‑level “timber habitats” sandwiched between steel‑and‑concrete mega‑floor plates above a seven‑storey concrete podium.
