This building caught my eye when I was walking to the Queensland ArtGallery to see the Indigneous Art Collection.

It is called Brisbane Square It was the four brightly coloured horizontal elements, which strike a counterpoint to the verticality of the office tower, that caught my eye.

It stood out from the low-grade, high-rise dumb buildings of the CBD that leach the city of architectural diversity as they inject bland homogeneity of glass towers. I remember it as a city block site that had stood vacant for many years as a dusty patch of withered grass.

Brisbane Square is not a square. Like Australia Square in Sydney and City Square in Melbourne, it is a residual commercial space with civic aspirations rather than a significant civic monument. As a building it expresses neither interest in the civic realm nor leadership in contributing to a vision of the city. I could see very little experimentation to develop alternative building forms in the CBD.

If Brisbane Square is more a standard commercial building rather than an experimentation to develop alternative building forms, the the architects Denton Corker Marshall designed the building as a glass box with state-of-the-art curtain wall glazing technology that achieves a five-greenstar rating. It has additional sun-screening with the sun-screen panels on the east and west facades, with pressed metal tapered struts which hold the panels off the building to accommodate window-cleaning apparatus and to enhance the environmental efficiency of the council tenancy zone.