Pirrama Park, Pyrmont

For a city so enamoured of its harbour image, Sydney has surprisingly few places where you can dangle your feet in the water. At Pirrama Park, a vast, flat, harbour-side platform – most recently the home of the Water Police – has been remade as a public park. Here the extreme scale of the harbour, open green space and the built form of the city are reconciled. The coherence of this composition belies the complexities of the site and speaks of the sophisticated approach of the multidisciplinary design team.

The consultation process is somehow ever present in the completed project – it feels as if the park caters for just about any activity for which the community could imagine it might be used. Underpinning the work is a carefully researched understanding of the history of the site. This is a great public place because it respects the past without treating it as a museum artefact; it has spatial, material and planting variety; and it offers a model for the future redevelopment of the harbour foreshore.

That industrial heritage is a useful part of the urban realm is a point of some contention in cities across the globe. In the context of this debate, Pirrama Park is a provocation – articulating the way the less picturesque, gritty aspects of the past can make a powerful contribution to the life of our cities.

– Jury citation