The Queen Victoria Building (QVB) underwent a $48 million refurbishment resulting in one of Sydney’s oldest buildings being returned to its former glory as a high-quality retail precinct.
Originally designed by George McRae, the building first opened its doors in 1898, as a monument to Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Providing the community with a concert hall, coffee shops, showrooms, warehouses and a wide variety of tradespeople and over time the hall became the city library and offices.
The project has been overseen by project managers, Coffey Projects, with Built responsible for the renovation works which have included substantial internal refurbishment of the existing shopping centre including vertical transportation and finishes. The centre remained fully operational throughout the upgrade which involved new signage, shop fronts, escalators and landings, elevators connecting the 5-level shopping centre. Other elements that were also refurbished include improved lighting which has contributed to a refreshed ambience for this much-loved Sydney landmark.
Award winning architects, Anchor, Mortlock and Woolley were responsible for resurrecting the QVB’s heritage values and architectural design, which included creating a feature out of the magnificent columns by installing frameless glass shop fronts.
The building work has also embraced a strong focus on water conservation and energy reduction and achieving a reduction of approximately 13.7% per cent in the overall QVB power consumption. There is also a conversion from electricity based cooling to gas absorption chillers. The use of 100% environmentally friendly refrigerants means zero global warming potential and zero ozone depletion.
We undertook the mechanical, hydraulic and fire services upgrades and introduced an innovative approach to overcome power availability problems within the QVB refurbishment project. Replacing the existing electrical chillers with new gas fire absorption liquid chillers was a crucial element for the overall upgrade, thus reducing the building electrical load. We were also involved with the upgrading of general mechanical services, new escalators and lifts upgrade, new absorption chillers new high efficiency heating plant and upgrade of heat rejection systems.
Client: Ipoh
