Transforming the Brisbane CBD and rivers edge with an iconic design that embraces Brisbane's inviting subtropical climate and celebrates the precinct's Indigenous and European heritage with interpretive trails and experiences, Queen's Wharf is a one-of-a-kind tourism, leisure, and entertainment destination.
Masterplanning an iconic destination
Comprising of multiple hotel towers, three residential towers, a sky deck observation platform, retail precinct, public event space and a new pedestrian bridge, Queen's Wharf connects defining parts of the city such as the Botanic Gardens, the Parliamentary Precinct, the Queen Street Mall, the Brisbane River and Southbank, the Cultural Precinct via the Neville Bonner Bridge.
Our team has been involved since the project's infancy through to the final construction, helping masterplan and design across sustainability, structural and services engineering, to pedestrian flow analysis, and fire protection.
Queen's Wharf received the city's first 6 star Green Star Communities rating for its world-class sustainable design. The rating is based on assessing the sustainability performance of the precinct across five impact categories - governance, liveability, economic prosperity, environment and innovation. As the appointed sustainability consultants for the project, we designed many of the features used for the Green Star assessments such as central energy plant, water treatment systems, energy efficiency modelling and the automatic vacuum waste system.
The innovative vacuum waste system will efficiently move general and recycling waste, depositing into a central waste handling facility.
Waste diversion was also a key part with over 100,000 cubic metres of fill from the demolished site used for the Auto Mall development.
Creating new structures and retrofitting heritage
The historic Queen's Wharf Brisbane precinct is the first site of European settlement nearly 200 years ago, and a home to Indigenous Australians for thousands of years. It holds one of the greatest collections of culturally significant heritage buildings and places in Australia. Positioned between William Street and Queen's Wharf Road, it covers more than 12 hectares of land within the Brisbane CBD.
The new pedestrian bridge linking Queens Wharf and Southbank is named after Senator Neville Bonner (1922-1999), the first Indigenous Australian to be elected to Federal Parliament. It is a unique hybrid arch-cable-stayed pedestrian bridge spanning 320m across the Brisbane River. The structure comprises of a slender 4.5m wide composite concrete fixed to 1200mm deep steel I girders, supported by 18 cables connected to the tapered steel arch and mast "ribbon". With maximum clear span of 140m and total height above the river of 75m, the structure was very slender and required considerable analytical analysis and design of all main components.
Designing and building a bridge over an existing motorway required extensive planning and testing. Our multidisciplinary team used offsite fabrication to trial key components of the structure before it was installed.