Pier Pavillion

Opened to the public in April 2025, Sydney’s waterfront has welcomed a striking new addition with the opening of the award-winning Pier Pavilion at Barangaroo.

With its blend of architecture, ecology, and public space, Pier Pavilion sets a new benchmark for waterfront design in Sydney. Chosen from more than 170 entries in a national design competition in 2020, the winning concept by Besley and Spresser pays homage to the land, sky and sea of Barangaroo.

The pavilion’s most distinctive features include 85 sculptural columns soaring over seven metres high, a façade crafted from terrazzo embedded with more than 450,000 recycled Sydney rock oyster shells, and a native roof garden. The garden, designed with sustainability in mind, incorporates 2,500 drought-resistant native plants, sandstone boulders, and hollow logs to provide habitat for local birds and insects.

An oversized central oculus, which provided many complex engineering challenges, provides a focal point for the architectural design, linking the plaza below with the sky. The shallow profile of the pavilion roof, particularly at the perimeter, resulted in a series of radial tapered steel trusses supporting concentric roof framing and custom CLT roofing panels. These span to a torsion ring truss around the central oculus which redistributes the load back to the perimeter columns.

The pavilion sits suspended on a wharf above the harbour, requiring detailed assessment of the existing structure, installation of new piles and capping beams as well as detailed and column specific detailing and necessitating the ‘internal’ columns, running along the main bench seat be non-loadbearing – hung from the pavilion roof – in order to reduce the load on the wharf below.

The exposed location required detailed wind-loading assessment in conjunction with the facade engineering team as well as careful detailing of the ‘oystercrete’ terrazzo cladding panel fixings and framing surface treatments.

Commissioned by Infrastructure NSW and project managed by NPC, SDA Structures are delighted to have worked with the competition winning architects Besley and Spresser and as a member of the design and construction team that included builder Stephen Edwards Construction, which was recognised for its visionary design and use of sustainable materials by the Concrete Institute of Australia. ,

Photograph courtesy of Rory Gardiner