The high rise office won Building of the Year at the World Architecture Awards in Frankfurt last year
3 min
T o understand the level of detail involved in the design and construction of the 50-storey Quay Quarter Tower, you need to know about the cab ride Dan Cruddace, project director from BVN, and project architect Fred Holt for 3XN took early one morning across Sydney Harbour Bridge.
“It was 2016 and we were trying to address solar radiance from the building,” Dan says. “We realised that for two hours from 6am from April to September, the reflectivity in one spot of the tower could potentially blind some of the drivers on the bridge.”
After their run across the bridge, they modified the design of a select number of windows on the upper block of what was best known to most Sydneysiders as the AMP building, now Quay Quarter Tower.
“We developed a system of tilting the glass on the upper block by 2.3 degrees which resolved that issue,” Cruddace says.
It’s a testament to the attention to even the smallest details of this complex build that appears as a series of five stacked ‘boxes’, each slightly pivoted to manage light, connectivity between floors and the challenging topography of the Circular Quay site.
Award-winning local architectural firm BVN were chosen to partner with Danish firm 3XN, who won the international design competition for Quay Quarter Tower, partnering with construction giant Multiplex, to transform the AMP building, constructed in 1976, while retaining as much of the original building as they could.
Now the building has been recognised for its approach to sustainable building practices, with the announcement of the International High Rise Award in Frankfurt overnight. Rather than demolish the building completely, as part of the construction process, 7500 tonnes in carbon dioxide emissions by saving the southern side and core of the building.
Although AMP is the ‘anchor tenant’ for the building, several businesses, including Deloitte, have signed on to lease space, with the building expected to be fully occupied by mid 2023.
Cruddace says the team were very aware of the building’s place in Sydney’s story, in every sense.
“It’s at the front door of Sydney and Australia in terms of world precincts and connectivity to the harbour – it had that kind of gravitas,” says Cruddace. “It’s a once-in-a-generation project.”
Positioned in front of the historic Museum of Sydney, with the newly opened Quay Quarter Lanes to its left, visitors and office workers within are always aware of their neighbourhood, thanks to a skilful manipulation of levels and glazing so carefully crafted to control the worst of the summer sun from every angle that no blinds are required. Instead, occupants of each floor can appreciate views of nearby buildings – historic and contemporary – as well as through lines to the harbour and the iconic bridge.
“It’s an amazing site but the original building had so many problems with it in terms of layers of poor planning and permeability and there were real issues with the topography,” Cruddace says.
The rotation of the ‘boxes’ also allow for outdoor terraces populated with landscape design by ASPECT so that, even on the 30th floor, bees can be seen hovering over the flowering plants on the terrace.
If there is a recurring theme in this project, it’s connectivity. Every aspect of this building, from the market hall designed by UK designer Tom Dixon at street level, to the natural site lines to surrounding buildings and the harbour, to the stunningly sculptural spiral staircase that links several office floors, has been considered in terms of its relation to the other elements.
At the same time, spaces allow for intimate gatherings, private meetings or even solitude. It’s clear that at the heart of this project is the people who use it, whether they’re staff familiar with the layout or casual visitors to the retail spaces at street level.
Holt says it has raised the bar for what high rise buildings can and should be.
“The expectation previously for high rises was that they were just for providing efficiently stacked workspaces,” he says. “And they still have to be there. But users are expecting the experience to be engaging and to have spaces for collaboration and all those things that make us feel human.”
The team of BVN and 3XN have also won the design competition for Sydney Fish Market, an equally complex site due for completion in 2023.
Rugged coastal drives and fireside drams define a slow, indulgent journey through Scotland’s far north.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
