Sydney, please don’t lower yourself to a New York high-rise jungle

August 15, 2026 — 1:30pm

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’Tis the season of Sydney skyscrapers. The new Atlassian tower, the planet’s tallest hybrid timber structure, has just held its “topping out” ceremony, after soaring to its highpoint of 39 storeys. Approval has been granted for Castlereagh Place, a short walk from Hyde Park, which features not one but two 82-storey towers. At the lower end of the tall building scale, plans were unveiled this week for a 26-storey tower above the heritage-listed Sherbourne Hotel overlooking Darling Harbour.

All this as the Chau Chak Wing Museum at Sydney University hosts an homage to Harry Seidler, the pioneering modernist behind Australia Square, the city’s first truly high-rise skyscraper, and Blues Point Tower, which still offers one of the superlative views of Sydney partly, as the old joke goes, because Blues Point Tower is not in its line of sight.

At a time when attention has naturally been focused at ground level on the new plaza planned in front of the Sydney Town Hall, let us not overlook the CBD’s airspace and the congestion of its skies. Sydney, historically speaking a pretty stumpy city, runs the risk of becoming too vertiginous.

Even without the Opera House or Harbour Bridge, the Emerald City would have a finely contoured........

© The Sydney Morning Herald