Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
1 Elizabeth sets a new global benchmark by integrating transport infrastructure with city renewal to transform urban experience. Designed by JPW, it serves as Macquarie Group’s global headquarters within the Martin Place Metro Station precinct. This precinct also includes the 39 Martin Place tower by Tzannes, the heritage-listed 50 Martin Place renewed by JPW, and a metro station designed by Grimshaw.
1 Elizabeth won an 2025 International Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
Situated on the traditional land of the Gadigal, 1 Elizabeth establishes a contemporary gathering place. The tower is elevated 15 meters above street level on a central colonnade, allowing light, air, and open views into a spacious public plaza that covers the entire ground floor. Grand entries at the four corners connect with key streets and adjacent public spaces. A unique atrium at the plaza’s center channels natural light and ventilation down to the metro interchange six levels below. Retail spaces, public art, Indigenous artworks, and landscaping animate the ground plane, encouraging visitors to pause, socialize, and engage.
At 174 meters tall with 37 stories, the building integrates closely with the metro station below, guiding people into retail, lobbies, galleries, event venues, and workplaces. The commercial lobby floats above the station entrance plaza, maximizing ground-floor public space and hosting hospitality and gallery areas overlooking steady commuter flows. Eighteen glass lifts operate continuously in a glazed shaft along the street edge, animating the building both inside and out. Escalators lead to a double-height event venue that accommodates 800 people with city views and animated by the lifts’ movements.
Cultural Design Principles shaped the project to include Indigenous voices through language, planting, and art integration. The building’s curved facade is made of high-performance faceted glass, thoughtfully responding to the heritage character of 50 Martin Place and its silver dome. The podium uses red Finnish granite sourced from a quarry near the original one that supplied granite for 50 Martin Place in the 1920s, honoring the precinct’s heritage. The sculptural tower preserves sunlight on Martin Place, reduces wind drafts, and completes a trio of Hunter Street towers marking the transition between Sydney’s early informal street grid to the north and its later regular grid to the south.
Metro station infrastructure including plant, intakes, and exhausts is discreetly integrated within the first six above-ground levels, blending elegantly into the podium facades and streetscape.
1 Elizabeth is designed as a future-facing global campus connected to 50 Martin Place at five levels, creating combined floorplates of 4,000 square meters in the podium and between 1,500 and 2,000 square meters in the tower. Atria across floors foster community by visually and physically connecting people throughout the organization. A vibrantly colored stair winds through the atria to the top floor, where Macquarie’s social heart opens onto terraces enriched by heritage elements from adjacent 50 Martin Place. The glazed lift shaft creates a distributed core to maximize natural light and outlook in all directions while providing thermal buffering from the western sun.
Sustainability guided every design decision. The building operates on 100% electric services and achieved a 6-star Green Star design rating. A full fresh-air system combined with passive chilled beams delivers low energy use and excellent indoor environmental quality. Material use was minimized, including exposed ceilings throughout the workplace. Native planting was incorporated on tower floors, and three historic artworks were relocated from demolished buildings on-site to sit alongside newly commissioned public art.
By blending heritage, sustainability, and public engagement, 1 Elizabeth reshapes Sydney’s civic and financial district, setting new standards in integrated, sustainable commercial development and urban renewal.
Architects: JPW
Design Team: Paul van Ratingen, Matthew Morel, Matteo Salval, Natalie Minasian, Peter Blome, Xiao Jiun Phang, Adrian Esdaile, Vy Pham, Jacopo Scattolin, Jade Tran, Joanna Walczak, Benjamin Rowbotham, Riccardo Cola, Wayne Dickerson, James Vlismas, Thomas Studholme, Tim Li, Jordan Evans, Brendan Murray, Timothy Clare, Lenny Gitonga, Jun Li, Sarah Sim, Sidney Russell, Laura Castano Sanchez, Michael Kut, George Wang, Nicky Law, Ella Lockhead-Sperling, Vinchy Wu, Praveena Sivalingam, Celeste Wong, Jerry Feng, Rosie Ives, Marguerite Farmakis, Eugene Wu, Lillian Xao, Alex Prichard, Pedro Loureiro, Marta Alfaro Azcarraga, Kien Van-Young, Santiago van Arcken
General Contractor: Lendlease
Client: Macquarie Group
Photographers: Brett Boardman and Peter Bennetts
