Review: Architecture Australia, November 1997

Harbourings: Remaking Sydney’s Industrial Landscape

Perspecta 1997 exhibition highlighting the past, present condition and potential of obsolete industrial sites beside Sydney Harbour, at the Museum of Sydney from 1 August 1997. 

Pyrmont Sugar refinery, a site considered in the Harbourings exhibition. Image: Liz Cotter

All harbourfront cities have land that is inaccessible and unused. In it, the human figure can be rendered stark and dwarf. A central question surrounding these waterfront tracts is how to make them part of the metropolitan area. In particular, how can a change to their spatial structure affect their social structure in a relevant way? In Sydney, industrial tracts and infrastructure are found on the waterfront north, south and west of the city. Parramatta River is pocked with used, abused and abandoned military, industrial, public and private land. Some thirty sites are ‘available’ for redevelopment.

Harbourings  is about possible ways to effect that redevelopment. It is the work of several hands, curated by Peter Emmett and based on the reckonings of Rod Simpson and Richard Leplastrier.

The curatorial message of  Harbourings  is carried by the exhibition being both inside and outside the museum. The visitor inhabits Harbourings much as one would any building. For instance, the installation by Sam Marshall in the main gallery puts the visitor in the harbour; they wade through the air between plywood display units that depict the undulating bays and peninsulas representing Sydney’s north and south shores. Seven sites are identified as being opportune for reclamation. The sort of things which in the past have animated these sites for industry are such as Liz Cotter has displayed next door. A spur wheel, worm drive, air cock and diaphragm valve. These are Ambiguous Objects from the disused CSR site in Pyrmont.

Anne Graham, Peter Emmett and Les Mansom have reassembled the CSR site cooling tower above an uplit pool occupying the glass box which projects from the museum’s north-east corner. From a boardwalk laid around the pool, one captures oblique views of the museum forecourt, littered with old accoutrements of port activities, and of Richard Goodwin’s Parasite MOS.

By perching a racing skiff on the otherwise unusable terrace, Richard Goodwin parodies the docking of a ship with the land and, at the same time, the use of otherwise unusable areas on the waterfront. Tents are also part of the construction, ‘suggesting the transient sculpture of the harbour’.

Projected onto the blank north wall of the Museum of Sydney after dark is a ghost of the harbour shoreline.

Harbourings  is about the felt experience of industrial land between water and settlement. It puts on show the raw material of the harbour. It explores the factors that have shaped the Sydney waterfront and possible ways to understand it and remake it. This exhibition has set in motion a debate fundamental to Sydney

Christopher Procter  is Deputy Director Design at the City of Sydney.

Sustainability Stocktake

Three-day conference on environmentally sustainable development, arranged by the Urban Design Forum and the Council of Building Design Professions, at Barton Park, Canberra, 18-21 September 1997.

This must be the year of sobering retrospectives, as far as post-Rio and post-Istanbul (Habitat II) belly button-gazing is concerned. The idealists among the design community, still gripped by pre-Olympic green fever, deserve to feel good—but how well are we really doing, with sustainability initiatives everywhere, and everyone from Council X to agency Y firmly on the ESD policy bandwagon? These are odd times, to be sure, with the Howardians sabotaging progress in greenhouse reform and pushing for uranium mining in Kakadu while we are taking up the—for us—safe cause of saving the whales from evil Japanese and Norwegian Captain Ahab clones.

The three-day 1997 Urban Design Forum’s ‘Sustainability Stocktake was hosted by the Council of Building Design Professions: the, to many, shadowy umbrella organisation for the professional institutes of architects, planners, landscape architects and engineers, engineers, engineers. The conference, co-masterminded by urban design policy old hands Geoff Campbell, Bill Chandler and Leonard Lynch looked at ‘manifestations’: values, principles and projects of good intentions.

It was a pleasant and cosy affair, but strangely sanitised from the choking horror of Southeast Asian conurbations, with hopeful eco-art embellishing our efforts to turn Canberra green and think of Gungahlin as God’s gift to Mother Gaia. It was shielded from market pressures and government complicities—and yet it was an important event and a successful stock take, with a terrific array of nice tries presented, including Michael Mobbs’ fully retentive Chippendale house, Ken Woolley’s unsustainably elegant hyper-tropical sports dome and exhibition vaults on the new Sydney Showground, the Olympic Coordination Authority’s breathtaking green arithmetics courtesy of Colin Grant, and Wendy Morris and Chip Kaufman’s circular breathing approach to post-new-urbanism. The wonderful vintage Wendy and Chip performance won my personal prize, along with veteran stirrer Bill Chandler for his untiring effort to keep that great little UDF pamphlet going.

Great stuff, but—hello?—where is the progress? Where is the mass implementation of Mobbs’ seventies sanity? Where are the prayed-for solar generators and trail-blazing environmental innovations in Homebush? While Indonesia is burning, we fan our more sustainable barbies, casting a sidelong glance at our latest ESD policy drafts.

The inaugural Urban Design in Australia Award was given by the BDP at that occasion as well. In its glorious and dying final days, the last national government, had heeded Keating’s and his urban design task force’s advice to institute the Commonwealth Urban Design Award, received in 1995 by a glowing Rob Adams on behalf of Melbourne City Council and its efforts to make the CBD tolerable. That went out the window with everything else that smacked of program, policy or plan, and the BDP had the wisdom to rescue the orphaned idea from complete starvation, and nurtured it into their new urban design award program. Bravo! This first year’s honour was won by City West Development Corporation and its Pyrmont Point plan, epitomised by Angelo Candalepas’ Sicilian Cross Street housing scheme.

Professor Peter Droege  holds the Chair of Urban Design at the University of Sydney and is AA’s urban design editor.

Francis Greenway Architect

Exhibition on the life and works of convict architect Francis Greenway, curated by James Broadbent, at the Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, 29 July-1 February 1998.

Greenway is the best known of our early architects and has been lauded as long as Australian architectural history has been written. He is also the only architect to appear on our banknotes.

This is a wonderful exhibition, curated by Dr James Broadbent and researched by Mrs Joy Hughes. Any architect should make it his business to see it. Models, plans, illustrations, and many things not seen before, make it the definitive thing on Greenway and, with the superb catalogue raisonné, the last word for many years to come.

However, it has to be said that, despite exhaustive research, it probably does not advance what is known on Greenway all that much.

Greenway has been with me as long as I can recall. My soldier ancestor came to NSW, with the 46th Regiment, on the same ship and the first Australian members of my family were baptised in his great church at Windsor. I often wondered how such a building had been built in such a place at such a time? Like the Sydney Opera House, St. Matthew’s, Windsor, was surely the most remarkable Australian building of its age. When I first went to England in 1968 I went in search of Greenway; visited Downend Church, found Olive Greenway’s grave, visited the house at 34 Cornwallis Crescent that caused the forgery, saw the Clifton Club, Thornbury Castle and even saw the two paintings Greenway did in prison, then in the ownership of the Professor of Architecture at Bristol. I also discovered who the “eminent architect” was who had trained Greenway, a fact unknown by all those who had then written on him; Hardy Wilson in the 1920s, Malcolm Ellis in 1949, Morton Herman in 1954 and J.M. Freeland in 1968. It was in the office of John Nash that Greenway was served his articles. My assessment of him was published in Australian Colonial Architecture in 1978.

The authorship of many so called Greenway buildings is caught up with the other architectural talent of the Macquarie period, Henry Kitchen, “pupil of the justly celebrated James Wyatt”. So whereas with Henrietta Villa, Windsor Rectory, Glenlee and so on, I favoured Kitchen, Broadbent has favoured Greenway. Kitchen is even connected with Greenway’s masterpiece St. Matthew’s, Windsor, which for me has always added to the intrigue.

So the authorship of many of the buildings in the exhibition must remain attributions, including some of its stars, Henrietta Villa and Bungarribee.

What Broadbent has done well is to identify, for the first time, quite a number of demolished Greenway buildings. These include Sir John Jamison’s mansion on the corner of Margaret Street, the old Police Office (this later became the GPO and the columns of its later portico are now scattered around Sydney), the cottage orné, Cumberland Place, the house for George Howe, St. John’s Parsonage, his additions to Government House, the Queen’s Wharf Stores at Parramatta, Fort Macquarie and the Dawes Point Battery. These last two show his considerable ‘Gothick’ talent and strong Nash influence.

All in all, even with the attributions (a chance to display some superb colonial buildings) the exhibition shows Greenway to be an architect of considerable talent. Go and see this fine exhibition.

Clive Lucas, OBE, FRAIA, is a principal of Clive Lucas Stapleton and Partners, heritage architects in Sydney.

Architecture in Transition: The Sulman Award 1932-1997

Exhibition on public and commercial buildings which have won the NSW RAIA’s Sir John Sulman Medal, at the Museum of Sydney, 30 August-23 November 1997.

For an architect or a student of architecture, a visit to MOS should be mandatory. Concurrent with Architecture in Transition: The Sulman Award 1932-1997 are another two exhibitions; one titled Harbourings and a small display of architectural work from the United Kingdom. In addition, on the first floor one finds an area full of articles devoted to recent architectural debates. Perhaps MOS is becoming more relevant to an awareness of the profession than Tusculum?

With a healthy dose of cynicism, I was preparing myself for yet another exhibition of second-raters. After all, no NSW building has received the coveted national Sir Zelman Cowen Award and architects in NSW have recently been comparing themselves unfavourably against their Victorian peers, a comparison parallelling their respective State Premiers. As well, there are always accusations of cronyism, sometimes justifiable yet often gratuitously levelled at juries or at least individuals within juries. Has the profession become so politicised as to remove any credibility from the award?

In the accompanying publication, Andrew Metcalf tells us that the award is “too susceptible to the vagaries of individual taste” to make a neat architectural history package, and of course many exemplars of the profession in NSW have never received the award so it cannot represent a potted history of architecture. Nevertheless, the Sulman Medal has always, in my view, represented the ultimate accolade from NSW architects and, with few exceptions, this survey of work—from the handsome 1932 Science House by Peddle Thorp & Walker to the 1994 Governor Phillip Tower by Denton Corker Marshall—conveys a proud struggle for modernism and quality of architecture over the last 65 years.

The exhibition is minimally and handsomely installed by a talented designer, Jsuik Han of X Squared Design. In the long gallery, Ms Han has laid two tables parallel along the central axis, on which the winners are chronologically presented. These horizontal planes accentuate the length and proportions of the room—it has never felt more stimulating. Under each panel is a line of continuous light and a series of drawers revealing further material relevant to the schemes displayed above and adding another enriching layer to the reading of the exhibition and the space. Bridging the gap between the two tables are models of buildings or artworks used by the architects.

At both ends of this display are screen panels which define two small, subsidiary areas used to project slides of the Sulman winners against the gallery’s end walls. These spaces are perhaps not all that comfortable, giving little temptation to dwell.

Clear graphics indicate buildings demolished or soon to be demolished and the years when juries felt no projects were deserving. The exhibition is lucid and the strong sense of space is a testament to MOS and appropriate to the quality of the Sulman.

The catalogue by Andrew Metcalf, published by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (and crediting an extensive team of researchers, contributors and organisers from the RAIA, MOS and State Library), is a good record of the award; however it gives little sense of the quality of the exhibition. There is a surprising strength to the body of work and its installation.

Brian Zulaikha is a principal of Tonkin Zulaikha, Sydney architects noted for adaptive reuses of old buildings and urban schemes.