The Ribbon

Providing views over Sydney’s iconic Darling Harbour, The Ribbon is set to create a new gateway to the Western edge of the city’s CBD. The 25-storey hotel and serviced apartments will offer a new home to the IMAX theatre. The structural frame of the building is highly complex due to the shape of the building, but also the requirements of the building to accommodate different occupancies in the building, such as the IMAX theatre, the conference rooms, car stackers and the hotel rooms.

Holmes’ fire engineers developed performance solutions to address non-compliances in the building and provided a bespoke fire safety strategy with particular regard to the fire compartmentation strategy for the development, the fire protection systems of the car stacker, the staged evacuation strategy for the building and the potential for smoke spread via the atria connecting multiple levels in the building.

Holmes also provided structural fire engineering solutions to assess the robustness of the steel structure under exposure to severe realistic fires. Through advanced modelling and finite element analysis, our specialist Structural Fire Engineers were able to demonstrate the reduction and omission of steel fire proofing, whilst demonstrating the robustness of the structure under fire exposure. This provided, not only cost savings in the overall fire protection for the project but also reduction in labour time.

Our involvement in this project meant that the architectural vision for the building did not have to be compromised by the prescriptive requirements of the building code, and the cost of fire safety and construction could be optimised whilst maintaining an adequate level of safety to occupants in the building.