16 hours ago
Developers lodge plans for Australia's tallest building with 101-storey tower in Southport
A consortium has submitted plans for a two-tower development on the Gold Coast that would include the tallest building in the southern hemisphere.
Melbourne developer Anthony Goss first proposed One Park Lane in 2022.
The group has spent the past two and a half years negotiating with the Queensland government to amalgamate a small parcel of state-owned land adjacent to the site, and obtain approval to build underneath a state-controlled road.
The project will include a razor-thin 101-storey tower with 198 residential apartments and a 60-storey office building.
The towers will be connected by a sky bridge on the 22nd floor and a three-storey sculptural canopy at their base.
If built, the development will rise 393 metres above the Southport broadwater, towering over the spire of the nearby Q1 (322m) and Melbourne's Australia 108 (316m).
However, it will not come close to the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (830m).
Baracon development manager Brett Rogers said if the project was approved quickly, early works could start before Christmas, but would not say how much the apartments would cost.
"This development will help address the desperate need for more housing on the Gold Coast and stimulate broader economic activity," Mr Rogers said.
There is no height limit in that part of Southport, which is zoned as a priority development area.
The 1,500 square metre site is next to a light rail station and close to a public park where Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate hopes to build a $480 million indoor arena before the 2032 Olympics.
He said it was a "vote of confidence" for his vision to transform the suburb into the growing city's business district.
"It's great to see an application of this magnitude in Southport, which has the potential to be a great boost to the city's housing stock," Cr Tate said.
It would neighbour a 200-unit social housing apartment complex that broke ground this week.
An urban planner said the tower contained a relatively small number of apartments for its size and appeared to include 40 levels of full-floor penthouses.
Sustainability and urban planning lecturer at RMIT, Liam Davies, said it was healthy to have a mix of people of varying income levels within a single community.
"There are two ways of looking at it. The first is that it feels weirdly unjust," Dr Davies said.
"A luxury building where people live in apartments that span multiple levels, and then next to it is social housing that has much higher density.
"But we can also look at it and see what we want is a distribution of dwellings across an urban area of dwellings to accommodate a variety of households."
He said the Gold Coast was likely able to attract these developments because it was a permissive planning environment where people wanted to live, compared to Neom's The Line project in Saudi Arabia.
"They're trying to deliver mega permissive things but no-one wants to live there so they never get the capital whereas the Gold Coast has both," he said.
Local councillor Brooke Patterson supported the ambitious development and said there was a lot of demand for office space in the suburb.
"I don't think they're going to take any issue filling it," she said.
Ms Patterson's predecessor, long-serving Southport councillor Dawn Crichlow, said because the site was so small — boxed in by the light rail line on one side and local bowls club on the other — construction would cause traffic chaos.
"The whole thing won't work, it's as simple as that," she said.
"You will have to change all of Scarborough Street, nobody would be able to get in and out.
"They're not looking at the area, they are not talking to the people, they are just looking at pretty pictures. It's a mess."
