[+] The Skinny On Slender Towers in Australia

When you can't go out you go up. Slender towers have risen across land-poor cities such as New York and Hong Kong, where land is at an absolute premium. And while architects in Sydney and Melbourne have pitched ideas for the bombastic skinny skyscrapers, few have managed to get one over the line. In this The Urban Developer Plus feature, we take a look at some of the skinny towers completed and planned for our cities and ask: does this design trend actually stack up in Australian cities? Phoenix Apartments ▲ Phoenix Apartment tower was Australia's first skinny tower, delivered in 2013. The first skinny tower to appear on Australian soil was the Phoenix Apartments in Melbourne. Fender Katsalidis architect James Pearce worked on the project, which was completed in 2013, and says it was an out-of-left-field solution for a small lot—just 6.5m wide. But if he tried to design the same building again today it would not meet planning approvals in Melbourne. Pearce says the idea was spawned by conversations with the client onsite, looking at pushing the limits to 15 storeys. “There became no natural limit as to how high we could go aside from the structural limitations, the wobble of the building,” he said. “It’s probably the shortest building that has a damper tank (which reduces sway) in it.” The 6.5-wide site was about 24m deep with the tower rising to 88 metres. Early design ideas included a drive-on lift where residents would drive on and park in their whole-floor apartment. But ultimately, Pearce explains, a car stacker was adopted. “It wouldn’t be able to get a permit now, due to setback constraints and gaps required between buildings … but it wouldn’t be right if everybody did this sort of development. “The endeavour to try for that out of the usual solution should always be encouraged. We always need to be exploring divergent ways of doing things. "It’s one way we are re-imagining and urbanising the city and using those smaller sites.” Collins House ▲ The Bates Smart-designed Collins House in Melbourne rises 61 storeys above its heritage facade. Another slender Melbourne example is the Bates Smart-designed Collins House development. Bates Smart director Mark Healey says the building is the world’s fourth-skinniest tower with a plot ratio of 50:1. Since the building's completion, the allowable ratios in Melbourne have been restricted to 18:1. “Collins House is a bit of an anomaly. It’s a really interesting building from an efficiency point of view,” Healey says. “To get a building like this to stack up required a highly innovative approach from both the design and construction teams.” With a diminutive site that was equivalent to the size of a netball court, a creative approach was required to make the development commercially feasible. The developer, Golden Age Group in partnership with the Deague Group, negotiated the air rights over the neighbouring heritage building allowing 4.5m cantilevered modules to be fixed to the structure of the building. A large gantry was built over St James Lane to accommodate one of Australia’s largest high performance cranes to hoist the pre-fabricated modules into the air, allowing free access to the entire site. Healey explains the pace of construction was improved by employing modular construction, slashing 10 months off the time a program employing traditional construction techniques would need, and feeding into the viability of the project. “It’s a unique building created through the ingenuity of the development, design and construction teams working closely, which with a footprint that is so small you get something extraordinary.” The building includes a German 110-car stacker, damper tank and 257 apartments across 61 levels. It also features a refurbished heritage facade and a lobby that painstakingly recreates heritage details from the original Huddard, Parker &amp; Co’s 1908 interior through castings that were taken prior to demolition in a nod to the property’s provenance. ▲ A residential slender tower in New York's Manhattan Mid-Town. Planning laws not conducive While there are few Australian examples of slender skyscrapers, the jury is still out on whether they are a performance solution for small lots or constrained city sites. University of Sydney Professor of Urbanism Donald McNeil says there are few sites in Sydney where a slim tower would make sense. “And even then, given the amount of water views around the city, there are many arguments against the aesthetic profile of a small number of pencil towers on the skyline. [They] deliver relatively few benefits compared to their visual and sun plane impacts. They are unlikely to be favoured by most city planning controls,” McNeil says. “There is certainly a school of thought that would see clusters of smaller towers as creating an interesting urban fabric, which is certainly what we see in the likes of Tokyo and Hong Kong. “But given most slim towers are very constrained to start with, there is usually a problem in making the lower levels functional in terms of light and lift access. "The appeal of these buildings is very niche and limited to a small number of potential tenants, and the ratio of lift and service access compared to floorspace is usually unattractive.” Slender towers often ‘pure speculation’ ▲ In Sydney, Architectus won approval for a slender tower at 4-6 Bligh Street (left), and recently put forward plans for a dynamic wedge-shaped hotel at Haymarket (right). Architectus recently put forward a skinny hotel proposal for a Haymarket site and successfully lobbied for a 50 per cent increase in height for a permit-approved skinny tower development of 4-6 Bligh Street. But Architectus chief executive Ray Brown says some skinny tower proposals are fantastical and “purely speculative”. “The more tall and slender a building is, the more difficult the economics become,” Brown says. “Sometimes skinny tower proposals are pure speculation and a way to increase the value of the land. They look very exciting.” New York’s love affair with the skinny skyscraper pushed high-end living sky-high, but Brown warns that it “may have been a moment”. “It’s an economic expression,” Brown says. “I think it’s not impossible for Australia’s capital cities to develop these towers, but we don’t have those astronomical prices that they were achieving in New York. “New York is absolutely a global market. Sydney has nowhere near the depth of market to accommodate those very high prices for so much floor space.” Brown says developers tended to prefer easier builds on bigger sites because they were more commercially viable and faster to market. Pencil Tower Hotel ▲ Construction will start on the Pencil Tower Hotel at 410 Pitt Street in July. But one slender tower will be punctuating Sydney’s skyline as the project moves to break ground mid-2022. Durbach Block Jaggers won the design competition for a 6.4m-wide site at 410 Pitt Street with its audacious Pencil Tower Hotel design. Durbach Block Jaggers director Neil Durbach said the 30-storey, 173-room hotel tower would be topped with a Turkish bathhouse on the small site. “The site is about the size of a Paddington terrace house, so the hotel will be 30 terrace houses one on top of the other,” Durbach said. “It is going to be the fifth-thinnest tower in the world. “Developers are trying to maximise whatever they can … I think it’s an exciting evolution of incredible slender buildings—what happened in New York changed people’s perspectives on what you can build.” York Street Hotel ▲ SWA Group has designed a 15-storey skinny tower on a 160sq m block in Sydney for a 57-room hotel. Design firm SWA Group has put forward plans for what could be Sydney’s skinniest tower at 5.7m wide on a 160sq m block at 139 York Street, near the Queen Victoria Building. Falcone House would be demolished to make way for the 57-room hotel, which would rise to 15 storeys with a podium at street level. RMIT research fellow Dr Louise Dorignon says pencil towers are being built to serve the luxury, high-end market and cannot deliver an affordable housing solution in Sydney or Melbourne. Dorignon is part of a research study on the lived experience of post-millennium high-rise apartments in Melbourne, Perth, London and Barcelona. She says good design is crucial in apartment living . “This study shows that small apartments without good design raise numerous liveability issues,” Dorignon says. “Boutique apartments often have complex facades which, in turn, create odd-shaped internal spaces that are not convenient for furniture or circulation. You could say they are like tiny sports cars built for looks rather than functional vehicles.” You are currently experiencing The Urban Developer Plus ( TUD +), our premium membership for property professionals. Click here to learn more.

[+] The Skinny On Slender Towers in Australia

Get the full story.

The Great Densification: Zoning Alone Won’t Fix Housing Crisis

Prefab, Modular, Ready-to-Go: Construction Innovation Evolves

High-Stakes Bid to Shape Adelaide’s Next Urban Precinct

Modular Hotel Rises on Queenstown’s Steepest Site

No Template, No Shortcuts: Divya Mehta on Leadership and Scale

Melbourne Long Lunch | Panel discussion with Tim Price, Jeremy McLeod, Katya Crema & Anne Michaels

A fireside chat with Troy Daffy | Managing Director, Silverstone Developments

Brisbane Long Lunch | Panel discussion with Rob Comiskey, Frank Licastro, Steve Laffey & Alexandra Stuart-Robertson

Sydney Long Lunch | Panel discussion with Jamie Durie, Jennifer Macquarie & Michael Romano

The Great Densification: Zoning Alone Won’t Fix Housing Crisis

Momentum Building for Melbourne After a Tough Year

Blackstone Pays $1.2bn for Queensland’s Hamilton Island

Key Worker, HDA Approvals as Sydney’s New Era Dawns

2026 Developer Outlook Lunch | Melbourne

2026 Developer Outlook Lunch | Brisbane

2026 Developer Outlook Lunch | Sydney