The Martin Place Metro Precinct represents a groundbreaking approach to urban development, seamlessly combining a state-of-the-art metro station with multiple high-rise developments in Sydney's civic and financial district. This ambitious project, designed through a collaboration between Grimshaw Architects, Tzannes, and Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW), creates an unprecedented integration of public transportation and commercial real estate development.

The precinct centers around a new metro station designed as a major interchange, connecting to the existing Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra Line while accommodating future metro connections. Above ground, the development required relaxation of Sydney's tower setback standards to accommodate two impressive new towers: 1 Elizabeth Street and 39 Martin Place. Each tower features cross-block links at street level, complemented by a public through-site connection beneath the historic 50 Martin Place building.

What sets this project apart is its comprehensive integration model, where private equity funded the entire development at no additional cost to the government. This represents far more than a simple air rights transaction over a transit station. The project required extraordinary spatial, political, and economic alignment between transportation needs and business interests, making such developments extremely rare in the urban planning world.

The project came to fruition through an unsolicited proposal (USP) process driven by Macquarie Group and led by Michael Silman, the company's head of corporate real estate. Silman orchestrated the collaboration, bringing together JPW to design 1 Elizabeth as Macquarie's new headquarters, Grimshaw to handle the metro station and transport planning, and Tzannes to lead urban design and deliver 39 Martin Place.

Macquarie Group's previous headquarters occupied 50 Martin Place following JPW's 2015 transformation of the building, which included a major atrium with interconnecting stairs and a distinctive glazed, lozenge-shaped rooftop addition. Former CEO Nicholas Moore envisioned consolidating the bank's staff into a single connected campus while creating a lasting legacy for the city. The unique public benefit that distinguished this USP was a pedestrian connection underneath both 50 Martin Place and Martin Place itself, addressing a gap in the government's original reference design.

The pedestrian link materializes as "Sonic Luminescence," an artistic sound and light tunnel created by artist Tina Havelock Stevens. However, the tunnel's lack of retail activation and indirect southern connection make it feel less genuinely public than initially envisioned. The historic 50 Martin Place serves as both the conceptual and physical cornerstone of the entire precinct development.

Tzannes developed urban design principles that treat the existing building as a architectural reference point. The building's rusticated, polished red granite base functions as a material unifier and datum for the new structures, while its monumental columns facing Martin Place inspired reciprocal design elements in 39 Martin Place. The cornice lines establish podium heights throughout the streetscape, and the elegant rooftop dome became the foundational concept for the formal relationship with the new Macquarie headquarters at 1 Elizabeth.

Below street level, Grimshaw's design team, led by Andrew Cortese, created a station that maximizes benefits from the buildings above while establishing multiple transport connections beneath the city. The public realm begins at platform level, where the binocular-style station design—featuring two separate tunnels—transforms into a public space through multiple cross-connections leading to a grand north-south concourse through the site's center.

The station employs a civic materials palette including sandstone-toned glass-reinforced concrete panels with engraved naming, granite flooring, and indirect lighting to achieve quiet and enduring architecture. Stacked escalators at either end of the concourse carry passengers past integrally designed retail storefronts to street level, with the northern end centered around a light-filled, ten-story void of Piranesian scale.

This spectacular space celebrates vertical public movement on the new City and Southwest metro line, designed to evoke excavation through sandstone layers. Passengers arrive in a semi-enclosed outdoor plaza at street level, where north light floods down to platform level. The weather-protected space allows orientation time while featuring integrated public artwork by Mikala Dwyer. The atrium connects to the 1 Elizabeth lobby and end-of-trip facilities, various cafes, and public seating, creating high activation and development integration.

JPW's 1 Elizabeth tower forms part of a trio of high-rise buildings with 126 Phillip Street and 8 Chifley that front Richard Johnson Square with zero side-setbacks. Overcoming the city's podium setback requirements enabled the core and lateral structure to be positioned at the boundaries, sitting on the metro station box's perimeter walls. This strategy frees the metro site's center for generous concourses and voids that extend vertically through the new Macquarie headquarters.

At ground level, the rusticated base unifies the three precinct buildings and creates a clear Metro identity in the city streetscape. The base breaks at either end of the block to create cross-site connections. The northern cross-block link doubles as access to Macquarie's raised lobby, originally designed as a laneway between 50 Martin Place and 1 Elizabeth. This generously scaled space features brass panels above a granite base, incorporating public amenities including seating and charging stations, though its lack of retail makes it feel more corporate than genuinely public.

The building connects with 50 Martin Place at various levels, including the rooftop. Leveraging the success of 50 Martin Place's vertical stair and atrium, 1 Elizabeth incorporates a central void through the floor plate. The displaced core and lifts on the western boundary free the center to become an atrium within a contiguous side-core floor plate, with light provided through dramatic glazed lift shafts on the tower's western facade.

Tzannes' 39 Martin Place takes inspiration from 50 Martin Place's original form as the Government Savings Bank. The building creates a threshold and conversation with 50 Martin Place through continuity of its rusticated granite base and cornice lines, alongside a sophisticated abstraction of the columns fronting Martin Place. These elements are reinterpreted as a fluid, rippled facade that successfully captures monumentality in contemporary expression.

The building's podium palette of curved glass, granite, and matching ceramic tiles creates an expression befitting Martin Place's conservative vision. This street-wall building successfully completes the enclosure of Harry Seidler's MLC Centre plaza, improving urban coherence. A through-site link connects Castlereagh and Elizabeth Streets, incorporating the metro entry and engaging with Seidler's iconic mushroom-like Commercial Travelers Association building.

The tower form sets back from Martin Place while a recess above the podium distinguishes the tower on side streets. The tower expresses itself as a contemporary curved glass volume held by a masonry frame that integrates building and metro services into a unified whole. Double horizontal sunshades on the north elevation formalize its orientation toward Martin Place while providing passive shading and reducing problematic reflections onto the nearby Sydney Cenotaph memorial.

The Martin Place Metro Precinct represents monumental city-making, from its Piranesian entry void and interconnected subterranean links to integrated artworks and connected campus headquarters. The project ambitiously combines transport, public connections, heritage preservation, public art, and corporate campus amenities. The station's public generosity and urban connectivity, along with two new towers that uniquely interpret 50 Martin Place's historic and contemporary forms, demonstrate urban development at a grand scale that sets new standards for transit-oriented development worldwide.