Emerald City was a design proposal by Crone for Gazcorp, it is an oasis at the heart of Green Square, a gateway into Sydney, layered within a series of Australian landscapes.

Sitting within the rapidly evolving town centre of Green Square, the proposal seeks to create a genuinely mixed-use precinct. It is one where all programmatic outcomes can work synergistically to activate the site and surrounds providing quality environments to live and work with immediate access to retail, lifestyle and recreational amenity.

Civic Presence
Emerald City is an opportunity to enhance the urban design ambitions of the new town centre at Green Square. Through the urban form, it can integrate with neighbouring development and public spaces to establishing a gateway corridor into Sydney.

Development on this site will be very prominent from Green Square Station and the town centre, contributing to an active urban precinct. Therefore tower language is intentionally designed to be less traditionally residential and more of a CBD tower language to integrate with the town centre aesthetics and surrounding development typologies.

Visual Connectivity
The urban presence of the Southern tower elevation is particularly important, as it can be seen from the town centre and significant open spaces of Green Square. The tower length is articulated in detail, centrally broken and curved at the corners in such a way to limit the overall block and reduce the sense of scale from this critical public domain vista.

Active Edges
It’s crucial that the buildings incorporate high-quality building and materiality outcomes and do not turn their back on the station and town centre in the form of blank façade or single loaded planning, providing visual activation.

Blue Sky Reading
The three buildings have been designed as individual buildings ‘in the round’ positioned autonomously above the retail podium and linked through the landscape and private open space connections. The tower positioning provides more significant sky-view factor between buildings when viewing the site from the broader city context, from surrounding public spaces as well as from within the subject site looking outward.

Civic Integration
The design proposal contributes a built form and language that complements the desired mixed-use nature of the locale. The project seeks an appropriate bulk and scale at the interface of the Green Square town centre and the Waterloo Park locality. A primary vertical modulation strategy breaks down the tower forms on the buildings, presenting as a series of vertical neighbourhoods which are linked through landscape features.