Sydney’s central business district is studded with skyscrapers by international architecture firms, including Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s Aurora Place (2000), Foster + Partners’ Deutsche Bank Place (2005), and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners’ 8 Chifley (2013). The work of these big guns from abroad is so pervasive that it’s almost unusual to see a high-rise development led by Australian architects. Not far from Sydney Cove, the compact bay that connects Jørn Utzon’s Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, a new building by Sydney-based fjmt has been designed to show the strength of going local, not global. Fjmt’s design director, Richard Francis-Jones—whose studio won the World Architecture Festival’s World Building of the Year in 2013 for its work on the Auckland Art Gallery—predicated his firm’s competition-winning scheme on demonstrating a rich Australian sense of place, a counterpoint to the bland globalized homogeneity of glass-and-steel office towers. The EY Centre isn’t the tallest building in the district—its height was limited by a requirement for sunlight access for a nearby square. But in a downtown dominated by high-rise buildings of cool gray stone and dark glass, fjmt’s 37-floor, 509-foot-tall building is a surprising shot of warmth: a curvaceous, organic form lined top-to-bottom with timber blinds that glow golden in the bright Australian sunlight from behind a single pane of clear, low-iron glass.