New Sydney Fish Market, New South Wales, Australia, Modern NSW architecture photos, Australian property design
19 January 2026
Architects: 3XN
Location: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Photos ©Rasmus Hjortshøj
New Sydney Fish Market, Australia
Designed by 3XN GXN in association with BVN Architecture and Aspect Studios, the new Sydney Fish Market on Sydney’s western waterfront is a bold architectural statement and a new urban landmark for locals and visitors that reimagines the traditional working fish market as a public destination.
The traditional working fish market’s new home integrates retail and wholesale operations with public realm activation, revealing its inner workings, live auctions and the choreography of daily trade. This offers visitors an authentic behind-the-scenes experience of one of the city’s most visited waterfront destinations.
The publicly accessible market hall is twice the area of the previous site, now accommodating 12,000 sqm of fishmongers, restaurants, cafés and specialist vendors, recreating the atmosphere of a lively, intimately scaled market. Overall, the scheme provides 6,000 sqm of accessible public space, with plazas at each end of the building enabling informal gatherings, creating further connections with the water and continuing the 15 km Sydney foreshore walk.
The Site / From Post-Industrial Site to Public Amenity
The new Sydney Fish Market is the first project delivered by Infrastructure NSW (INSW) as part of the urban renewal of Blackwattle Bay. The 3.6-hectare site joins a string of the city’s iconic harbourfront landmarks, including the Sydney Opera House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Circular Quay, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Barangaroo, and Darling Harbour, and is expected to attract around six million visitors a year, including locals and tourists alike.
The building is a radical reinterpretation of a market that transforms an underutilised harbourfront area of Sydney into a vibrant contemporary precinct and public realm. It creates a publicly accessible waterfront destination with sustainability embedded in its lively atmosphere, drawing on the renewal of Sydney Harbour’s industrial heritage.
Design Concept: Merging the Market and the Agora
As Australia’s largest seafood wholesale hub, the Sydney Fish Market manages the daily distribution of millions of kilograms of fresh catch through auctions and specialised cold-chain logistics, an industry process once largely concealed from public view. The competition brief for the new building called for a radical proposal: how can we combine industrial infrastructure with a vibrant public destination? Our design responds by reimagining the traditional market archetype, one of humanity’s oldest social and civic institutions where commerce, culture and community converge, within the current context of sustainability, hospitality and cultural experience.
The new Sydney Fish Market uniquely combines a fully functional, commercially operational fish market with 12,000 sqm of retail space and high-quality public realm. While physically separated, the daily operational logistics and the public realm maintain purposeful visual connections from strategic points in the market hall to the surrounding ground-level public space. The building delivers an authentic open-air market feel while creating a sense of place through its visual connections to the city, park and harbour, enhancing the surrounding precinct and offering a direct, welcoming connection to the waterfront and urban fabric.
The building merges the market and the agora, creating a public realm that brings people together through educational experiences, such as the SFM cooking school, and through visibility of back-of-house operations, in addition to providing ample space for social and civic events around the public plazas. By making what is typically back-of-house front-of-house, the new Sydney Fish Market celebrates Sydney’s seafood culture while also providing generous public waterfront spaces, transforming a previously closed operation into a civic asset. The result is an accessible and architecturally significant piece of urban infrastructure that connects high-volume commercial activity with a welcoming waterfront destination.
From Park to Bay: An Elevated Waterfront
The new Sydney Fish Market is conceived as a raised plaza that restores harbour foreshore access for Sydneysiders and visitors alike. By continuing the scenic 15 km foreshore walk from Rozelle Bay to Woolloomooloo, it features over 6,000 sqm of accessible public open space and establishes a direct, welcoming connection to the bay from the neighbouring Wentworth Park.
At its edges, generous amphitheatre-style stairs gently ascend each face of the perimeter, guiding visitors from the ground plane into the heart of the public market experience and establishing a seamless, active edge along the waterfront. These water- and city-facing steps double as informal seating that overlooks Blackwattle Bay and the Anzac Bridge, as well as two new public plazas that create a public dining terrace extending the market hall into the landscape and public realm, supporting and enhancing an enriched and connected waterfront experience.
One Expressive, Performative Roof Canopy
The roof canopy of the new Sydney Fish Market rises as a central architectural element. The 20,000 sqm undulating canopy, with its timber structural underside, appears to float above the open, mixed-mode retail floor, unifying the market’s diverse functions while creating a distinctive silhouette against the harbour skyline. Weighing 2,500 tonnes, the 200-metre-long floating roof is composed of 594 sustainable, glued-laminated timber beams (glulam) and 407 pyramidal aluminium cassettes.
The form and modular system of the roof have been optimised to favour efficiency and sustainability, allowing a range of optimised environmental performance outcomes. The geometry and orientation of the cassettes are designed to reflect natural light into the space while screening direct sun and providing shading. It reduces the market’s dependency on artificial climate control by allowing the harbour breeze to naturally flow through the building.
Additionally, the roof’s undulating geometry, informed by the programme stacks below and by topographical modelling, enables rainwater harvesting through two low points that sit over two of the four cores, collecting rainwater from the roof with 50% filtered for reuse. The two-hectare canopy hovers above the upper ground market hall and office spaces, providing a mixed-mode solution for passive climate control and reducing energy loads by up to 35% through natural ventilation and daylight.
Embedded Sustainability and Innovation
Sustainability is embedded throughout the design of the new Sydney Fish Market as an integral part of the form, not as add-on features. Every element performs multiple functions, delivering both environmental performance and an exceptional visitor experience. The design achieves a 50% reduction in potable water usage through an integrated roof rainwater collection system and an on-site mechanical filtration system.
The roof’s south-facing cassettes, which allow indirect daylight into the market hall, reduce artificial lighting needs by 15%; seamlessly integrated solar panels generate 5% of the market’s energy without compromising architectural expression. Internally, the public circulation axis uses passive conditioning, such as canopy shading, natural ventilation and indirect daylight for the upper ground level. These zones’ thermal environments create comfortable microclimates with minimal energy use. In addition, energy systems include absorption chillers that convert excess refrigeration heat into cooling, and the strategic use of leftover ice to pre-cool air for refrigerated areas. From the roof canopy’s design to the mechanical strategies, a 35% reduction in energy use is projected.
Beneath the upper ground, the public market hall forms the ground level, the industrial backbone of the new SFM operations, operating efficiently within its own climate-controlled environment. The ground floor accommodates the essential wholesale infrastructure: delivery docks serving both land and sea, refrigerated processing areas, wholesale coolers and freezers, and a 14°C operations floor that utilises triple-glazed façade panels for visibility, and the heart of the operations: the auction hall. This approach allows the retail floors above to maintain their open, naturally ventilated character while ensuring the efficiency and performance required of a high-volume industrial facility are maintained.
(Outro)
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 harbour-side development, integrating industry and the public realm, demonstrating that the two functions are not mutually exclusive.
It extends the foreshore promenade and connects Blackwattle Bay to Wentworth Park, while showcasing the behind-the-scenes activity of a beloved Sydney institution. The new Sydney Fish Market creates a destination where six million annual visitors will experience the intersection of working industry, cultural programming and the waterfront public realm. We believe buildings that enhance their context are more readily embraced by their communities. By becoming more than architecture, they turn into cherished places and active precincts. When a building is loved, it is cared for; when it is cared for, it endures. This project aspires to that rare occasion where public affection for place transforms into lasting preservation, ensuring the market’s vitality for generations to come.
The new Sydney Fish Market will open on Monday 19 January 2026.
The new Sydney Fish Market was delivered by Infrastructure NSW and construction partner Multiplex.
The new Sydney Fish Market was designed by 3XN GXN in association with BVN Architecture and Aspect Studios.
Pull Quotes
Design Approach
Audun Opdal, Senior Partner, 3XN
“The new Sydney Fish Market is transforming an underutilised harbour area into a vibrant public realm filled with programs that attract both locals and visitors. The fish market uniquely blends a fully functioning commercial operation with high-quality public space, delivering an authentic market experience rooted in the context of its prime waterfront location while enhancing the entire surrounding precinct.”
Sydneysider Experience
Fred Holt, 3XN Partner, Australia Director
“Every Sydneysider has a story about the Fish Market, often dating back to their youth. With the new Sydney Fish Market, our aim is to retain the authenticity and spectacle of a working market, while transforming it into a catalyst for community life. Central to this vision is a commitment to the highest standards of sustainability and a deep respect for its unique Sydney Harbour setting. Our hope is that the new Sydney Fish Market becomes a place where Sydneysiders and visitors alike gather throughout the year.”
Embedded Sustainability
Lasse Lind, Partner and Head of Consultancy, GXN
“With this building we are redefining what a sustainable and resilient market can be. The modular roof is not only a sculptural structure that gives the market its identity; it also supports many functions. It harvests every raindrop and holds solar cells, it provides natural daylight and passive ventilation, and it enables complete reconfiguration of spaces below as the market needs evolve. We’ve cut potable water usage by 50% and significantly lowered the energy consumption without compromising on the market’s authenticity or architectural ambition.”
Kim Herforth Nielsen, Founding Partner
“With the new Sydney Fish Market, our ambition was to design more than a building that houses a fish market. We aimed to create a cultural global food destination that also serves as a centre for the local community. We always strive to give our designs greater meaning and functionality beyond their basic purpose, because, as we believe, architecture shapes behavior, and with the right design we can make life better for the public.”
Architecture: 3XN – https://3xn.com/
Photographer ©Rasmus Hjortshøj
New Sydney Fish Market, New South Wales, Australia images / information received 040126
Location: Allambie Heights, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
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