The now-opened Sydney Fish Market, designed by 3XN GXN in association with BVN Architecture and landscape architects ASPECT Studios, is the largest fish market in the southern hemisphere and a major new civic landmark for the city. It establishes a 24/7 community hub where workers, locals and visitors can come together to celebrate the fishing industry in Sydney’s harbourfront.

The first project to be delivered by Infrastructure NSW as part of the urban renewal of Blackwattle Bay (Tjerruing), the 3.6-hectare site joins a string of the city’s iconic harbour sites, including Sydney Opera House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Circular Quay, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Barangaroo, and Darling Harbour, and is expected to attract over six million visitors per year.

The publicly accessible Market Hall is double the area of the previous site and accommodates 12,200m² of fishmongers, restaurants, cafés and specialty vendors, creating the atmosphere of a lively, intimate marketplace. The design carefully separates various circulation flows, enabling the daily operations of a working fish market to safely coexist with public visitors. Expansive, glazed facades create strong visual connections to the harbour, ensuring an authentic open-air market feel.

Integrating retail, tourism and wholesale operations under one roof, the project reveals the daily choreography of trade, offering visitors an authentic, behind-the-scenes insight into the inner workings of the market. The Auction Hall accommodates 160 buyers who will bid in a modern, Dutch-style auction where bidding always starts at the highest offer. Large screens display auction information and visitors can watch the daily activity from the adjacent hall or from the southern promenade through extensive glazing that provides a peek into the industrial backbone of the market.

Within precisely controlled climate zones, bespoke equipment supporting live seafood, sorting the daily catch and producing up to 70 tonnes of ice per day is visible to the public as they move through the retail market, offering rare insight into the complex logistics that keep the market operating from pre-dawn hours.

The vertically integrated design significantly reduces the building’s footprint, ensuring the market remained in the heart of Sydney. Twenty-six lifts service four distinct levels, enabling seamless movement of product and personnel between an underwater basement, trading floors and administrative offices.

Highly complex design solutions were required to meet stringent humidity, hygiene and operational demands, while also achieving 5-Star Green Star certification. Reimagined industrial processes have been incorporated throughout, diverting up to 80% of waste away from landfill.

An undulating 20,000 m² floating roof unifies the entire complex with sustainable technology and stunning design. Weighing 2,500 tonnes, the 230-metre-long floating roof is composed of 594 glued laminated ‘glulam’ timber beams and 407 pyramidal aluminium cassettes lined with solar-panels, reducing the building’s daily energy consumption.

The form of the roof's structure has been optimised to favour efficiency and sustainability, with the geometry and orientation of the cassettes designed to allow natural daylight into the space while also providing shading. The roof’s modular construction simplifies construction, significantly reducing the need for internal artificial lightning; and therefore, reducing energy loads.

In addition, its undulating geometry, informed by the programme below and topographically modelled, allows rainwater harvesting through the collection at two locations. Collecting every drop of rainwater that hits the roof and filtering half for reuse, as well as the introduction of a wastewater treatment plant, halves the potable water consumption of the new market. The two-hectare roof canopy hovers above the upper ground market hall and office spaces, providing a mixed-mode solution for climatic control, reducing energy loads by up to 35% due to natural ventilation and daylight.

Naturally ventilated retail spaces incorporate passive design principles, drawing in harbour breezes. The plazas’ indigenous landscape palette includes wetland flora to filter stormwater. The sustainable ambitions of the project also extend to the restoration of marine habitats, where 3D-printed artificial coral panels cover the tidal edge of the market’s wharves and underwater lattice structures suspended from the underside of the market provide new habitats for sea life.

The new building becomes part of the harbour’s edge, linking the Rozelle to Woolloomooloo foreshore walk, completing the scenic 15km path.It features over 6,000m² of accessible public open space and establishes a generous, welcoming connection to Blackwattle Bay from neighbouring Wentworth Park.

Generous, external staircases gently ascend each face of the building’s perimeter, guiding visitors from the public domain into the heart of the public market experience, forming a seamless and active water’s edge. The stairs overlooking Blackwattle Bay double as informal seating, creating an elevated public dining experience that extends the landscaped public realm into the heart of the market.

The new Sydney Fish Market aims to realise Blackwattle Bay as a vibrant, connected, inclusive and resilient gathering place for Sydneysiders and visitors alike. It represents more than a new building; it acts as an exemplar of harbourside development, integrating industry and the public realm, demonstrating that the two functions are not mutually exclusive.