In Retrospect: Lessons from the International Design Competition for Barangaroo

Abstract

The original winning International Design Competition for the Barangaroo site in Sydney, previously known as East Darling Harbour, was overturned by politics and planning. There is a stark contrast between this competition proposal and what has been built instead. In this article, Philip Thalis offers important lessons for urban design process and product.

About the Author

Philip Thalis is an architect and urban designer, Professor of Practice in Architecture at the University of New South Wales and former Independent City of Sydney Councillor, 2016-21. He co-authored with Peter John Cantrill the book ”Public Sydney; Drawing the City”. Philip was part of the winning team of Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects, Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture and Paul Berkemeier Architect, for the East Darling Harbour International Competition. Contact Philip.t@hillthalis.com.au

Preface

I have chosen to publish this article on a very contentious urban development because of the light it throws on the nature of urban design and the principles of design and policy that are drawn out by the author.

Thalis, rightly, believes that urban design is fundamentally concerned with the public interest and its physical manifestation in public space: It’s the design of the public space structure and the organisation of the primary public elements. These are the pre-conditions for enabling many individual designers and developers to build up particular sites over time, with varied expression, in a way that nonetheless produces a coherent whole.

Whatever my personal view on these schemes is unimportant. Except to say this: Design is an evolving process as is city development itself.  Some 18-years have gone by since the competition, with a very different and varied public domain result.  What is certain, is that public land has been eroded through excessive private development that has been allowed to happen, in fact, by and large encouraged in favour of the developer interest and to the public dis-benefit. In this, I can understand the criticisms of the author as a serious proponent of urban design.

Raeburn Chapman, Editor, Urban Design Review

Introduction

The site of the 2005-2006 international competition was the 22-hectares of publicly-owned foreshore, a 1.2 kilometre-long stretch of the city centre’s harbour front. Of 137 entrants, our scheme was unanimously selected by the New South Wales Government-appointed jury. Instead, Barangaroo over the last two decades has become the antithesis of our winning plan.

Historic Context

Sydney has experienced an accumulating series of critical urban transformations in its relatively short European history. High points include Governor Macquarie’s visionary projects in the decade after 1810, the Surveyor General’s grid plans of the 1840’s, the Planning Commissions ambitions of the early 20^th century, the Sydney Harbour Trust’s massive reconstruction projects at Millers Point, Walsh Bay and Woolloomooloo, engineer Bradfield’s transportation and bridge building schemes and architect Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.

The 22-hectare city waterfront site of East Darling Harbour had been used for shipping and industry since the 1830’s. Its ramshackle wharfs and shipyards that grew over the 19^th century were replaced at the turn of the 20^th century by Chief Engineer Walsh’s great urban project for the Sydney Harbour Trust: new finger wharfs, shore buildings, public housing and community buildings, all framed by the decisive sweep of Hickson Road linking all together and connecting through a series of new ramped streets to the wider city.  Changes in shipping with the introduction of containers made the finger wharfs outmoded.  From the 1950’s they were demolished and replaced by the vast apron of concrete container wharf, reclaimed by long and deep sea walls sunk into the harbour. The site reached its current size when the last infill was constructed in the 1970’s but its usefulness for major shipping was soon eroded by the establishment of Port Botany, the growth of the central business district and the recreational development of Darling Harbour in the 1980’s.

This site had the potential to be another decisive urban project with a far-sighted vision and effective means of development and delivery, with the opportunity to give a public structure to the western edge of Sydney’s city centre. A two-stage international design competition was launched in 2005, and our scheme was judged the winner in 2006.

 Design Principles and Ideas

The foundation of our plan was that the entire foreshore, 50 per cent of the site, be transformed into a continuous and inalienable public park. The brief required 50 per cent of the precinct to be public open space, but did not specify the form or location. To tie this physically isolated area into the broader city, we proposed new public transport and a generous connective street system. The latter included a new park-edge street, as the western complement to Macquarie Street, Sydney’s major civic street defining the eastern edge of the city centre alongside the botanic gardens and distinguished by its historic civic buildings.

The grand waterfront park was calibrated to the alignment of the former wharves and shorelines, creating an alternating pattern of filtration gardens, greens, activity and event platforms and hardstand squares. A range of new public places and facilities was proposed. This included theatres, community buildings, outdoor event spaces, major site-specific public art, a playing field and floating harbour pools beside the expansive re-greened headland. Development would include a significant percentage of affordable housing and workspaces. The retained container seawall allowed for opportunities for some ongoing shipping use.

Logically, the government would progressively build the armature of new public spaces, intended to be connective, amenable and characterful. This would in turn enable the roll out of individual development sites to be marketed to a broad range of competitors. Our scheme therefore did not proscribe architectural outcome but was founded on the strategic ordering of streets, clarity of distinction between public and private space and encouraging high quality architecture within this framework.

The project was anchored by an understanding of the place and its history of change.  The western edge of the city was characterised by the vivid traces of its past – its expansive industrial scale and physical remnants, the powerful horizontal datum of the wharf apron and the cut bedrock alignment of Hickson Road to the east.

Our project drew on the enduring qualities of Sydney’s best ensembles. Its urban blocks would be permeated by a complex new public domain of streets, lanes, pathways, bridges, parks, gardens and courtyards that filter access through the site to the new waterfront park and myriad public uses.  The aim was to create a robust and open urban framework, intrinsically tied into the existing urban structure.

The Competition Process

Instead of our winning urban plan being implemented, a few members of the design jury directed the competition winners to modify their concept for the headland. There ensued a process of erosion of the scheme‘s design rationale, starting in 2007 with a reductive process to turn the scheme into the dry planning orthodoxy of a Concept Design. By 2008 the remnants of the urban plan were reduced to bloated development superblocks, boosted in height and floor space. By early 2009 all semblance of defining public space layout was abandoned with the creation of the Barangaroo Delivery Authority.

 

 

At the end of 2009 the NSW Government jettisoned the then vestigal framework of the competition scheme altogether. A closed commercial bid for design and delivery of what became known as Barangaroo South ensued, a still-secretive process that excised a 7.3 hectare mega development parcel. This was arguably the largest parcel granted to a single developer in the city’s history, with seemingly carte blanche for them to rewrite the ‘planning’ rules to their own advantage. Instead of the public interest, Barangaroo South prioritised the private interest of a single developer, whose scheme of streets are amongst the most miserable ever constructed in the city – narrow to the point of meanness, treeless, walled off from the harbour beside and dominated by massive towers.

The development cartel headed by Lend Lease, with their main architects the international firm of Rogers Stirk Harbour, at first proposed a 230m tall hotel jutting into the harbour on a 150m long pier.  This provoked such intense public outrage it was dropped and has since phoenixed as James Packer’s hotel and casino tower, Crown, slid onto land at Barangaroo Central.

 The Outcomes

The three Richard Rogers (of Rogers Stirk Harbour) mega-towers at Barangaroo South are daunting in scale, reversing the original profile which now rises instead of descending along the 1.4km western edge of the city, known in the Depression year as “the hungry mile.”  The Chris Wilkinson (of the UK-based firm Wilkinson Eyre) designed Crown Casino, at the wrong-ended peak of the profile, is a glassy 275m high protrusion climaxing the commercial towers, which start at 107m and rise to 250m. The result of a process lacking transparency, aptly named as an Unsolicited Proposal, James Packer’s casino tower claims as its own what should have been a continuous public foreshore park. The tower dominates the fine heritage areas beside at Walsh Bay and Millers Point and casts long shadows across the mean residual public spaces. It is a blight on the city skyline – visible across the inner city and from as much as 60km away.

 

Overall, Barangaroo today lacks worthwhile civic spaces addressing the harbour. The promised foreshore promenade, already reduced to 30 metres in width, has been further narrowed to as little as 16 metre in places and is appropriated by commercial uses.  The promenade is walled off from the city behind by slabs of high-end apartment blocks and the casino’s enormous podium.

Meanwhile, the further development stage of the project, known as Central Barangaroo, remains locked in controversy. Its attempts to change the Concept Plan (actually Modification 9) were rejected and withdrawn. A new application, which in the traditions of development at Barangaroo, boosts floor space and height while obliterating any public space framework, is also subject to intense criticism.

A Statement for the Future

Rewind to 2006 and we might ask whether any self-respecting competition jury would have selected today’s Barangaroo, with its fragmented and diminished parks atop massive car parks, mean streets with no connection to the harbour and its cursory cultural investment – all dictated by development cartels delivering a shiny 75-storey casino hotel plonked down on the foreshore and a phalanx of bulky commercial and glassy residential towers usurping the foreshore and despoiling historic vistas? Yet, this is precisely the outcome that successive State Governments have imposed at Barangaroo.

Barangaroo today bears no resemblance to the jury’s selected winner; indeed it has become the antithesis of our plan, what can only be called a mounting pile of squandered opportunities.

Spanning eight Premiers and counting and a revolving door of Planning Ministers, the public interest at Barangaroo has been manifestly betrayed. The agenda has been so easily subverted by developers fixed on their own, exclusive, benefit.

The three Government agencies and their backroom advisors that have had carriage of Barangaroo have been particularly culpable. But behind them have been an ineffectual state Department of Planning, who have rubber-stamped every development excess, every erosion of public space. And out of sight and above them all has been the New South Wales State Treasury, demanding to extract profit while minimising ‘risk’ as they narrowly perceive it, in the process foregoing transparency and a long-term dividend to the people of NSW. The more progressive and capable City of Sydney, under whose local government jurisdiction Barangaroo falls, has been explicitly removed from any involvement, and its detailed criticisms of each of successive modifications have been studiously ignored by the State Government.

This is systemic failure.

But the negative effects of Barangaroo today go well beyond its site boundary. Its dubious offspring are now spawning across greater Sydney. The priority for economic gain over longer term civic value has been a recurring theme in Sydney’s development history. Currently around the inner city alone gross plans are on display at Bays West, the Fish Markets site at Blackwattle Bay, North Eveleigh and the Central Station over-development. The wanton demolition of the public housing at Waterloo also looms large.

Like Barangaroo, despite these sites being public land, all the current proposals are development-led. That is, they lack a committed, compelling and strategic public space plan at their heart, and with scant public program to make these vast tracts benefit the wider city. Rather they are conceptualised primarily as atomised sites for exploitation. An exploitation that squanders opportunities for public land for future generations. Contrast this with Green Square, where the City of Sydney has invested more than $1.2 billion on new public streets, parks, pools, a library, a school, infrastructure and community buildings to sustain the emerging community there – surely the model for density done well.

 

Today’s Barangaroo is a shallow experience. The bloated office towers have the highest vacancy rates in central Sydney. There is scant retail diversity or associated street life. While the glinting apartment towers may have their empty-nester residents call in on occasional visits, no affordable housing has been provided. The Casino no doubt awaits yet another inquiry into its activities, while all the while its tower looms menacingly over the public foreshore. The closed vistas of the mean streets, severed from the harbour, provide no amenity, landscape or functional flexibility. The central park may now finally be delivered (though another competition), bringing the total area of parkland perhaps to 40% of the site area – well short of the competition requirement. Missing are the great public buildings to provide some cultural dimension and community dividend. The historic outlook  from Observatory Hill and Millers Point has been diminished by the glowering bulk of Barangaroo’s buildings dominating the foreshore. Only the new small harbour pool at Marrinawi Cove stands out as an authentic place-based project, an initiative conceived by and propelled by nearby Millers Point residents. Hopefully the imminent opening of the metro station along Hickson Road will give this stranded precinct some much-needed connectivity to the wider city, to counter the distinct impression of it being an enclave.

 

Barangaroo stands as the physical manifestation of an opaque and corrupted process. We the people must ensure that this is the last such alienation of our precious, irreplaceable public land. We need a more intelligent and long-sighted approach to ‘planning’, a renaissance of public agencies that can deliver us better cities and places fit for the climate, affordability and equity challenges of the 21st century. We need much more sophisticated measures than the short-termism of blinkered ‘business cases’ to guide city-making public projects. We must elect politicians who understand these challenges, who stand against the developers’ self-serving monologues and who act with ‘public imagination’ to champion better cities to serve our society’s future needs and aspirations.

Acknowledgements

Laura Harding for Figure 5, Figure 7 and Figure 14 Perspective.

Notes & References

For the 2006 Competition winning scheme Presentation Panels, model and Report, see https://www.hillthalis.com.au/projects/barangaroo-formerly-east-darling-harbour

Barangaroo was named after Barangaroo, the Cammeraygal woman and leader of the Eora Nation at the time of British colonisation. Her legacy lives on in the cultural significance of Barangaroo the place.