Audi’s new home wins a gong

AUDI’S high-profile ‘Lighthouse’ flagship dealership and national headquarters in Sydney has won the commercial architecture award at the New South Wales 2010 Architecture Awards.

The imposing glass-fronted eight-storey building that opened in August last year at a cost of $50 million also won a commendation for interior architecture.

The 16,000-square-metre multi-function building became the largest Audi dealership in the world, surpassing another in Shanghai, China. Since then, a dealership in Chiswick, west London, has claimed the title.

The Sydney building – which houses the Audi Centre Sydney retail and service operation – is based on Audi’s global ‘Audi Terminal’ concept by the brand’s master architect, Allmann Sattler Wappner, in Munich, Germany.

The local building is an interpretation by Sydney architectural firm Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW), whose director and lead architect on the Lighthouse project, Paul van Ratingen, said the innovative design elevated the humble car showroom to a new element with the city.

He said the building created a “strong public interface” with its more than 100 metres of street frontage and more than 45 million cars passing the site each year.

The building stacks its diverse operations, which include used car sales, aftersales centre, café, children’s play area, customer business centre, Audi Australia administration offices, 20-bay service centre and the new vehicle showroom for up to 25 cars.

When it opened, then Audi Australia managing director Joerg Hofmann said the building reflected Audi’s commitment to the Australian market, and its plans to grow its local sale volume to 15,000 vehicles by 2015.

This year, the company is on target to achieve 12,000 sales.