When Danish firm 3XN presented its concept for the new Sydney Fish Market in 2017, the selection committee asked whether the team had prior experience designing fish markets.
“We have experience in designing with water, fish and community,” replied Fred Holt, partner at the firm and now Director of 3XN’s Australian office, with a touch of irony. Four years earlier, Holt had overseen the opening of the Danish National Aquarium in Copenhagen. That remark marked the beginning of the collaboration between the City of Sydney and the Danish studio.

Today, almost a decade later, the project by 3XN in collaboration with BVN Architecture is finally complete.
“Our practice has worked on waterfront projects around the world, consistently opening the edge between land and water to public life,” explains Kim Herforth Nielsen, Senior Partner at 3XN. “The new Sydney Fish Market continues this approach: not simply as a beautiful and functional building, but as a civic threshold where harbour and city meet, inviting movement, exchange, and everyday encounters, and giving the waterfront back to the community.”

For Sydney, the fish market has always been one of the city’s most significant landmarks: at once a working piece of infrastructure, a commercial hub, a meeting place and a cultural and tourist attraction. A layered urban device, rich in collective memory. The new project embraces this legacy and translates it into an architectural vision that combines operational efficiency, spatial quality and the centrality of community life—fully aligned with the Danish studio’s founding belief that architecture can shape behaviour and improve people’s lives.

 Louise Pearson, Studio Director, Aspect Studios

This is why the building was conceived as an object accessible from multiple directions, reinforcing its strongly public character. Civic Plaza to the east and Western Plaza to the west welcome visitors with generous stepped terraces in concrete and timber—topographic elements that encourage both movement and pause, functioning like an urban amphitheatre. Always-open spaces from which to take in views of Sydney Harbour or the greenery of Wentworth Park.

To the north, the gaze opens directly onto the water. Here, the productive dimension—from fishing boats docking to the delivery of the daily catch—visually overlaps with public life. To the south, along Bridge Road, the project deliberately exposes the market’s “back of house”: storage, cleaning, distribution and even the auction become part of a daily choreography visible to visitors.

The landscape design by ASPECT Studios reinforces this idea of continuity between building and context. As Louise Pearson, Studio Director at the practice, explains, “the new harbour landscape reclaims a vital moment, creating a system of green and open spaces that allows the community and visitors to come together and watch a unique theatrical performance, where the boundary between inside and outside becomes blurred.”

Unifying the entire site is the large undulating roof—at once an iconic and infrastructural element—which moves in a fluid gesture from the shimmering waters of Blackwattle Bay to the parkland and on towards the city’s road network. “It’s our point of departure and the heart of the concept,” says Audun Opdal, Senior Partner at 3XN. “It’s from this suspended line that the very idea of the market emerged.”

As in traditional open-air markets, the canopy rests lightly on slender vertical elements, here integrated with glazed volumes housing the various functions: shops, offices, a cooking school, auction spaces and storage areas.

With its 20,000-square-metre undulating surface—200 metres long and weighing 2,500 tonnes—the roof is composed of 594 glued-laminated spruce timber beams of Italian origin, chosen for their stability and structural performance, and 407 pyramidal aluminium elements clad in photovoltaic panels. Its fish-back-like form is the result of geometric optimisation aimed at energy efficiency: the orientation of the modules allows natural light to penetrate deep into the interior, reducing the need for artificial lighting.

The curved surfaces also facilitate rainwater collection, which is filtered and reused for both potable and industrial purposes, while the continuous gap between roof and building enables natural ventilation and passive climate control, significantly lowering energy demand.
“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,” comments Lasse Lind, Partner and Head of Consultancy at GXN.

The project aims to revitalise the city while preserving the authenticity and functionality of the market, and at the same time to act as a catalyst for collective life. The result is a highly technical building that never loses sight of its civic role.

All images were photographed by Andrea Francolini for Domus.