Make models: Brookfield Place Sydney

Posted 26.06.2023

By Make modelshop

Client Brookfield Properties
Scale 1:200
Dimensions 600mm (l) x 600mm (w) x 700mm (h)
Time to make 12 weeks
Materials acrylic, plywood base, Kappa board, PLA 3D print, SLA resin 3D print
Model-makers George Taylor

Showcase Model Series

As part of our Showcase Models series, we’ve been working with university students from model-making courses to build models of our completed projects. We offer students a fully paid work placement with our modelshop team, during which they produce a model for their final year project. While a student at the University of Hertfordshire’s BA (Hons) Model Design (Special Effects) course, our latest modelshop recruit, George Taylor, completed eight weeks of work experience at Make. He then returned during his summer break to make a model of our award-winning project Brookfield Place Sydney. He explains below how he made the model.

The project

This new development in the heart of Sydney’s central business district includes a 6 Star Green Star-rated office tower, two restored heritage buildings and a triple-height urban hall for Wynyard Station – one of the city’s busiest transit hubs. The main station entrance is flanked by premium retail, with escalators leading down to a lower-concourse food hall and the transport interchange. By raising and suspending the central core of the office tower, using mega-columns in the boundary walls to support the building’s shear load, we’ve provided a new pedestrian route across the full 25m-width of the site. This grand passage connects George Street, Carrington Street and the nearby Wynyard Park, prioritising people and creating a dynamic new east–west connection.

We also restored the historic facade of the 10-storey Shell House, retained its 400-tonne clocktower, reinstated its former grand entrance on Carrington Street, and incorporated a rooftop restaurant and bar. Internally, the building links with the 10-storey atrium of the adjacent office tower for anchor tenant National Australia Bank, allowing us to deliver some of the largest commercial floorplates in Sydney.

The model

I started off by gathering the drawings, plans, elevations and photos associated with the project, then broke the project down into its different buildings and elements that would form the model. This process involved removing a lot of data to make the build appropriate for the scale. I then designed the physical model in Rhino using the simplified data.

Each building consisted of a core, floorplates and facade. The main facade (on the office tower) was made using 1mm-thick laser-cut acrylic, scored and sprayed with cellulose paint. I 3D-printed the top and bottom bands of the restored Shell House facade, which contained the most intricate historical details, such as the cornices, and I used a laser cutter for the simpler central elevation.

The building has entrances at different levels, the core is split, and there’s no continuous flat ground plane on the site, so anchoring the model base was the biggest challenge. The base needed to follow the contours of the surrounding streets and the slope of the site, so I used the exported digital 3D model from the architects to get the correct topography and then layered laser-cut contours. This was then clad with laser-cut acrylic and scored with road details that I sprayed on using cellulose paint.

One of the key parts of the model was the lighting. I created a custom light rig that fit into each building and connected to the base. To further animate the model, I added people and planting, as well as 3D-printed trams and cars, to show the scale of buildings.

Working from photos of the completed buildings, I mixed paint colours to get the right feel for the model. This meant building up layers of paints and speckles to get the correct texture, particularly for the heritage sandstone facade on Shell House.

The finished model is now on display in the front window of our London studio.