John Taylor & Sons - Hyder Consulting

Acer Consultants: modernisation through the merger
Seven Spirit Bay Resort, Northern
Territory.
Sydney Tower at Centrepoint.
was opened in Darwin and a joint operation was
set up with local consulting engineers, Wargon
Chapman Partners, who had been operating since
1963. Many award winning structures had been
designed by Wargon Chapman around Australia,
including The Centenary Bridge in Brisbane, the
American Express Building in Sydney, and the
spectacular landmark of the Sydney Tower at
Centrepoint. The construction of the 300m
tower and the 10 level turret building presented
an engineering challenge, requiring application of
new engineering techniques and new materials.
Many very tall structures around the world now
use damping devices, similar to the tuned
dampers/suspended water tank, pioneered at the
Sydney Tower. Wargon Chapman also designed
the tunnels and bridges linking Centrepoint
below the tower with adjacent department stores.
The joint operation of Acer Consultants and
Wargon Chapman Partners expanded and their
status grew until in 1990, with the creation of the
Acer Wargon Chapman Group, the number of
Acer staff in the country had risen to over 200.
AAMI Building, Brisbane.
Other major projects in this period included the
Park Plaza Development and hotels at Darling
Harbour in Sydney, the AAMI Building in
Brisbane and the Seven Spirit Bay Resort on the
Coburg Peninsula in the Northern Territory.
Wargon Chapman had been thinking about
the problem of solving the daily congestion on
the Sydney Harbour Bridge where, by 1986,
13,000 vehicles were crossing the harbour an
hour in the peak period, as many as it had
carried in a whole day when it was opened in
1932. In 1984, Wargon Chapman approached
Transfield, one of Australia’s largest construction
companies, and Kumagai Gumi, with whom
Freeman Fox & Partners were undertaking the
Eastern Harbour Crossing in Hong Kong. The
proposed immersed tube tunnel had the
advantage of requiring no private land requisition
and would link to expressways on both sides of
the bridge with no adverse permanent impact on
the environment. The Sydney Harbour Tunnel
Company was formed as a build operate transfer
(BOT) company with an agreement to build the
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